21. The Jihad Factory

21 THE JIHAD FACTORY

1995 Overseas Location

Sandwiched between my two tours with the East Asia Division, a unique opportunity came my way that sent me back to what I loved doing most: counterterrorism. Don’t get me wrong—fewer things in life are more gratifying than sticking it to the North Korean intelligence service, but chasing down radical ideologues who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the pursuit of whatever political objective they have is what I’d learned to do best.

King Ralph broke the news to me in mid-1995. I’d been working for him for two years when he called me into his office one day. By then, we had long since developed a great relationship and mutual respect. He’d also become a trusted friend. The Agency’s insularity and need for secrecy lead to close bonds between officers, especially when we’re stationed overseas together. It is very similar to the way military units will bond. In the past year, King Ralph and I had laid the foundations of a friendship that would last the rest of our lives.

I sat down across from him at his old-school, massive wooden desk. He greeted me and said, “Ric, I have good news and I have bad news.”

“Okay. What’s the good news?” I asked.

“You’re being promoted to GS-15. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

I’d reached the top of the general service pay grade within the CIA. This was great news. The next step up would be the Senior Intelligence Service rank—the senior-level management track—but that was never of any interest to me … little did I know.

“With the promotion, you’re being reassigned.”

“Where?” I asked.

“You’re going to be named a branch chief in a new component of the CTC.”

The CTC was the Counterterrorist Center, established in 1986 during the wave of radical Islamic attacks on U.S. targets that included the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the subsequent murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem on the tarmac at Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport along with the Palestine Liberation Front’s takeover of the Achille Lauro cruise ship off Egypt a few months later.

By the mid-1990s, the CTC included hundreds of officers and analysts who worked to uncover the machinations of such diverse groups as Japan’s Red Brigade, Iran-sponsored Hezbollah, along with a branch dedicated to Islamic extremist groups like the Palestine Liberation Front and Sunni-sponsored groups operating in Algeria.

Since the end of the Cold War, counterterrorism was where the action had moved. Fighting North Korean agents was a remnant of the CIA’s glory years when we battled the Soviet threat and their vassals. The future looked to be a lot more asymmetrical, and the number of terror threats seemed to multiply by the month.

Try telling the politicians that. They were so obsessed with the “peace dividend” that collectively they failed to see the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as anything more than an aberration, not a portent. Instead of beefing up our counterterrorism capability, the Clinton administration cut the CTC’s funding. Worse, after Iran-Contra, the CTC went from being operations-oriented to more of an analytical intelligence clearinghouse.

It was a difficult time. Yet that would soon change, and those of us who specialized in counterterrorism could see the storms on the horizon. For that reason, this transfer seemed like a plum assignment for me. I was going where the juice was again. My heart rate picked up just thinking about it.

Then I remembered King Ralph said there was bad news. “What’s the bad news?” I asked.

He smiled and said, “The East Asia Division is losing you.”

I arrived back in Virginia in the fall of 1995, eager to find out what this new assignment would entail. It did not disappoint. The CTC was an organizational experiment of sorts within the Agency. My old mentor Dewey Clarridge was the original CTC’s Chief. He designed it to be flexible and operate on a global level at a time when the CIA was organized along geographic divisions. Terrorism was a worldwide issue, with different groups operating on many different continents simultaneously, so Dewey’s vision for the CTC made a lot of sense. It allowed each branch within the CTC to chase bad guys wherever they went in coordination with the Area Divisions.

Since its inception, the CTC focused on state-sponsored terrorism. Groups like Hezbollah were supported by rogue regimes whose training and funding made them deadly effective. Nobody at the Agency could forget about Hezbollah’s attacks in Beirut in the early ’80s when they hit our embassy, blew up 241 Marines (including my first karate student, Billy San Pedro), and kidnapped CIA Chief of Station William Buckley.

By 1995, Dewey had long since moved on into retirement. The center was in the strong hands of “Winston W.,” an exemplary DI analyst, and his pit bull Chief of Operations, “Jeff O.” Jeff was another legendary ops officer whose unorthodox thinking and relentless demand for results made him perfect for the C/OPS job. At our first introduction, I found him to be smart, no-bullshit, and ultra mission-focused. At times, he bordered on gruff. Like most leaders at the CTC, Jeff was the antithesis of every bad joke about government work. Motivated by a profound sense of duty to protect the country we all loved, he worked late into the night, every night doing his absolute best to stop those intending to do our people harm.

If there was one person who could outwork Jeff, it was Mike Scheuer. Mike led the Islamic Extremist Branch within the CTC. He was an analyst, cold, calculating, with an ability to weigh multiple sources and find the balance between them. He’d dedicated virtually his entire career to understanding the Middle East and Islamic radicalism. By 1995, he knew more about the subject than anyone else in the building. His mind was an encyclopedia, a veritable who’s who of jihadists bent on doing the West harm.

It turned out Mike would be my new boss.

Jeff laid it all out for me in his office after only a couple of months back at Langley. At Mike’s urging, a new task force was being formed within the CTC, dedicated to one mission. It would be based outside the Agency’s main facility and would have no geographical limits. A building had already been leased and outfitted for us, complete with a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility) where we could safely read, process, and transmit classified information without it being electronically intercepted from outside the building.

This would be the Agency’s first “virtual station,” meaning we weren’t chained to a particular XXXXXX location or geographical boundary. It took Dewey’s original vision of the CTC and applied to it one specific task. Jeff had selected me to be Mike’s Deputy Chief of Station and its senior operations officer.

“What are we going after?” I asked Jeff as he briefed me.

“Not a what. Who. Osama bin Laden.”

“Who?” I said, before realizing how stupid I probably sounded.

Jeff smiled as if I’d just walked into a trap, and said, “Exactly.”

As it was for most Americans in late 1995, that name meant nothing to me. I’d spent much of my career working different CT targets in South America and East Asia, but this was a guy who’d never crossed my radar. Given we’d be standing up a special task force dedicated to one man and his organization, it was clear the CTC considered Bin Laden a significant threat to the United States. What the nature of that threat was, I had no clue. But I knew I was in for a steep learning curve in the months ahead.

We established Alec Station—named after Mike’s son—in November 1995. There were eight original plank owners, all handpicked by Mike. The team that took shape included an eclectic mix of analysts, targeting officers, an FBI liaison, and an irreverent, but most efficient, desk officer/program manager we affectionately called “JJ.” She was the spark at the center of our operation—brilliant, multitalented, and hardworking. She was blessed with great organizational skills, which any new organization needs. She also possessed a hilarious sense of humor, was energetic, and could cuss like a sailor. To this day, she remains one of my favorite people I worked with during my time in the Agency.

Our experience and training led to a diverse range of viewpoints and talents that Mike made sure meshed well. The core of our team included several female analysts who served as our targeters long before that became an official career track within the Agency. They were dedicated, relentless subject-matter experts on all things Osama bin Laden.

Historically, CIA analysts were segregated from operational folk at our area divisions. They would collaborate but were never colocated. With the advent of the “centers,” first the CNC for narcotics and subsequently the CTC, analysts and ops officers not only became colocated but gained full visibility into one another’s craft. Blessed with massive brain cells and now infected with our OO’s operational acumen and enthusiasm, these select analysts morphed into present day targeting officers—the deadliest animal I know!

Jennifer Matthews was one of our best targeting officers, a consummate professional who mirrored the work ethic and spirit Mike brought to the team. To outsiders, she seemed to be an average married soccer mom of two, with a third child on the way. A 1982 graduate of Central Dauphin East High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she’d been an accomplished student, a member of the National Honor Society, and active in her local chapter of Youth for Christ. Her classmates voted her “Most Likely to Be the Next Barbara Walters.” Even back then, her confidence was magnetic, and she rarely lost her poise.

A decade later, she seemingly lived in a quiet suburb not far from the Fredericksburg Civil War battlefield. Married and settled in her leafy neighborhood, she drove a minivan and shopped at her local grocery store like everyone else. To her neighbors and non-Agency friends, she appeared to be one of them—just another average American living to care for her family.

Once inside our building, she was a relentless hunter of terrorists. She had an intuitive ability to conceive plans to accomplish our mission that few others could even dream up. Mike loved her devilishly clever mind—we all did. There were times she’d come up with an idea that blew my own hair back and made me grateful she was on our side. I later learned that her nickname became “Ruth.” For ruthless.

In our new virtual station, she was not alone. We had other analysts who grew into targeting officers, including Mary Anne, Joanne, Cindy, and Kami, among others. I cannot forget our most capable, and Arab-speaking ops officer, GG. All were bright, dedicated, and vicious when it came to our mission—in a good way, of course!

In those first weeks, Mike opened up the fire hose of knowledge and pointed it my way. I’d had a brush or two with Islamic terrorists in the past, but I’d never worked that account before, so in some ways I started from scratch that November.

The first thing I needed to understand was why Mike considered Bin Laden such an existential threat. There were plenty of terrorists out there in the world calling for attacks on the Great Satan of the United States. Why did this guy deserve his own task force?

The answer lay in how Mike interpreted the man. He’d studied Bin Laden’s life and saw him not as a murderous psychopathic ideologue, as Osama was later portrayed in the world media, but as a leader of a growing movement inside Islam who possessed the resources, connections, organizational skills, and capability to inflict significant harm on the West.

Mike and other analysts had seen a pattern develop around the world. Since about 1990, Islamic radicals kept turning up in places like Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines, Somalia, and within the Palestinian community to foment terror attacks against moderate or secular regimes. They were diverse groups causing the chaos, but they shared one common nexus: Afghanistan. Every time Mike drilled down into the details of who was behind these operations, he discovered Arab veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War in the mix. In many cases, they carried out these attacks or financed them. As the attacks, especially in Algeria, grew increasingly bloody, the radicals grew emboldened.

More moderate elements in the Middle East considered this development a mortal threat to their own positions. Tips began flowing into the Agency as to who these actors were from sources in Tunisia, Algeria, and elsewhere. The nuggets of intel, as usual, were fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. Our analysts were split. Some, led by the Near East Division Chief, Fred Anderson, downplayed the role the Afghan vets were playing in the growing violence. Fred, who had led the Afghan Task Force during the ’80s, believed that there were enough homegrown radicals in North Africa and the Middle East already operating against moderate regimes. Any study of Egyptian history since the early 1970s underscored that point. The Afghan vets were playing in a field already dominated by local jihadist factions.

Others, including one of our best analysts, Paul Pillar, saw something new developing with the Afghan vets playing a key role in al-Qaeda. The fragments of intel we gathered did not look like the typical state-sponsored terror model of the ’70s and ’80s.

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX the radicals gained enough traction to pose a legitimate threat to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Arafat was in the process of negotiating with the Israelis, something the radicals violently opposed. Hoping to enlist the CIA’s help in containing this threat to his own base of power, Arafat sent proxies to the CIA XXXXXXXXXXXX to connect the dots for us. The PLO representatives fingered Saudi businessman and Afghan veteran Osama bin Laden as the man behind the jihadist curtain.

Bin Laden was the seventeenth of fifty-two children in his Saudi-born family. His dad was one of the wealthiest men in the Middle East, having made billions in the oil-fueled, booming construction industry. Osama was educated, well read, and devoted to his faith. A pure, true believer who not only spoke with conviction but acted with it as well. In 1986, he traveled to Afghanistan to join the holy war against the Soviet Union. At first, he functioned as sort of a middleman between the various mujahideen factions and wealthy Islamic donors wanting to support their cause. He funneled some of his own money to these groups as well; at the time his father supported him with a massive monthly stipend.

At his own cost, he imported and deployed a host of engineering equipment into Afghanistan—bulldozers, earthmovers, backhoes, and more. He earned a reputation for bravery among the Afghan fighters when he personally dug trenches with a bulldozer while under Russian fire. That willingness to expose himself to danger set him apart from many of the other foreigners supporting the anti-Soviet jihad.

He built an entire underground network of tunnels, magazines, and living quarters in a mountain range in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border. This would serve as his base of operations for years to come. There, his growing personal force of Afghans, Pakistanis, and Arab volunteers trained and equipped themselves to fight. Bin Laden earned even more respect among those who served with him, as he lived as they did—a simple and rugged life. How many sons of billionaires were so devoted to their faith that they lived in a cave and fought side by side with others to protect it?

Eventually, Osama’s band of Arab volunteers went into battle against the Soviets. He proved to be courageous and calm in a fight. In his last notable engagement in 1989, just as the Russians were completing their withdrawal from Afghanistan, he and his men attempted to seize the airport at Jalalabad. He was wounded in the failed assault.

His time in Afghanistan convinced Osama that Islam stood at a crossroads. He grew convinced that Western influence had triggered a moral degradation of his religion, but that jihad—holy war—was the one path to revitalize it.

A turning point came in 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Osama was living in Saudi Arabia, surrounded by his loyal followers from his Afghan war days. When it looked likely Saddam Hussein wouldn’t stop with Kuwait and intended to invade Saudi Arabia as well, Bin Laden offered to deploy his veteran fighters to stop the Iraqi army. The Saudi government ignored his proposal and turned to the United States for help.

The move deeply shocked Osama. He became an ardent opponent of American intervention in the war, believing that once the infidels were invited into the region, they would never leave. On that, events showed he was not wrong.

In early November 1990, an Egyptian-born American named El Sayyid Nosair assassinated an outspoken Jewish rabbi named Meir Kahane in a New York City hotel. Kahane was one of the founders of the Jewish Defense League in the late 1960s and had just given a speech to an audience of Orthodox Jews, urging them to immigrate to Israel.

When the FBI raided Nosair’s apartment, they found reams of material suggesting he was part of a plot to blow up skyscrapers in New York City. Nosair’s associates included an al-Qaeda operative and double agent named Ali Mohamed. This was probably the first nascent al-Qaeda effort in the United States. Bin Laden later paid for Nosair’s legal bills. The FBI didn’t inform the CIA of any of this, and in fact, the Agency didn’t find out about it until after 9/11. Had we known in 1995, those puzzle pieces might have provided more clarity for us.

Meanwhile, the Gulf War crystallized Osama’s thinking and shaped his entire strategy for the rest of his life. Supporting jihad as a mechanism to revitalize Islam morphed into a view that the United States, Russia, and China were Islam’s greatest enemies. The holy wars flaring in the developing world would never succeed as long as the United States in particular reigned unchecked.

He began to plot against American targets. In 1992, his operatives launched al-Qaeda’s first known attack against the United States when they detonated two bombs in a hotel used by marines in Yemen as they transited to Somalia, where the U.S. led a peacekeeping force trying to bring stability to that lawless, famine-racked nation. Osama saw the American presence in Somalia as nothing but naked imperialism, and he used al-Qaeda to support the forces fighting the peacekeepers.

After publicly criticizing the Saudi regime, he was kicked out of his own country and exiled, first to Afghanistan, then in 1992 to Sudan. He set up operations in Khartoum, establishing connections to the radical Islamic Sudanese regime that had recently seized power. He greased those ties with generous gifts to its leadership that totaled millions of dollars. He also established a variety of businesses in the city as part of an effort to not only create his own empire separate from his family’s but to modernize Khartoum. In a trade with the Sudanese government, he built a much-needed road from the country’s primary port to the capital. In return, he was given a large tract of land outside the city, which he transformed into a farm that sought to genetically enhance different crops, including sunflowers.

Behind his legitimate construction business and his agricultural operations, Osama continued to develop his global network. Yet he lived aboveground, worshipping at the local mosque five times a day and interacting with the local Sudanese, who considered him a kind and generous neighbor. How much of a threat did he really pose to the United States? The answer was murky at best. We simply didn’t know enough about him at the time.

As he had in Saudi Arabia, he surrounded himself with loyalists who fought in Afghanistan with them. His modest home in a Khartoum suburb was heavily defended with bodyguards armed with everything from AK-47s to reportedly SA-7 antiaircraft missiles.

By 1992, the core of Osama bin Laden’s supporters included mainly his old Afghan war comrades or members of the terror group Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). One of Bin Laden’s closest associates, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had taken over EIJ in 1991. The two had met in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s after Zawahiri had been released from an Egyptian prison, where he’d been tortured into revealing the location of one of the conspirators in the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat.

The following year, al-Zawahiri’s EIJ tried to assassinate two Egyptian leaders. Both attempts failed, and the second one resulted in a bomb blast that killed twenty-one people at a girls’ school. The death of a young student named Shayma Abdel-Halim turned much of Egypt against EIJ. During her funeral in Cairo, thousands of people flooded into the streets and chanted, “Terrorism is the enemy of God!”

In June 1995, while Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak arrived in Ethiopia for an official visit, EIJ terrorists attacked his motorcade with machine guns. Two security officers died, along with seven of the would-be assassins. Mubarak survived and returned immediately to Cairo, where he pointed the finger directly at the terror groups operating in Sudan.

Because of these attacks, the Egyptian government loathed EIJ and its al-Qaeda associates. When we first stood up Alec Station, we found the Egyptians to be very sympathetic to our efforts and willing allies in the fight against Bin Laden. Yet even they didn’t know much about the man or his organization, which seemed more like a loose coalition of like-minded groups and individuals than anything else.

In the summer of 1995, an Agency brief concluded that Bin Laden was the “Ford Foundation” that linked these jihadist groups together. Associates would approach him in Khartoum, sketch a plan of attack, and ask for the resources to finance it. Bin Laden provided the money and sometimes the weaponry.

Self-funded terrorism was not a new dynamic; Latin American Marxist terrorist groups gave birth to the term narco-terrorism because of practice. Early European terrorist groups carried out bank robberies and kidnappings to finance their activities. But with Usama bin Ladin (as the CIA originally spelled his name, and abbreviated it to UBL) it was different. The level of funding rivaled that of state-sponsored terrorism, with seven-figure donations (some say extortion) from wealthy Arabs. Some donors obviously just sought to appease him, but others we found to be sympathetic to his cause.

For us to counter this new threat, the CIA and the United States government as a whole would need to evolve new capabilities and operations. At Alec Station, that would be our greatest challenge: pioneering those evolutions as we struggled to make sense of what Bin Laden and his Afghan War cadre represented.

That challenge was made more difficult by the relationship between the CIA, the FBI, and the Clinton White House. President Clinton focused on his domestic agenda and paid little attention to overseas developments during his first term. His first CIA director, James Woolsey, once went over a year without a personal meeting with the President. Usually, a CIA director met daily with the President to brief him on the current global situation. Clinton preferred distance between himself and the Agency, reading the briefs himself. There had been a debate within the administration as to how to handle the growing terror threat. Should terrorists be considered enemy combatants and treated as such, or should they be prosecuted through the existing legal system? Clinton settled on the legal approach, which ultimately limited what we could do to counter or stop these holy warriors.

Between the FBI and CIA, communications were hampered even with our liaison efforts. At times, there were personal animosities involved, but most often our own legal system prevented the free flow of information between the two agencies. As a result, we each held pieces of the Bin Laden puzzle that we both needed to develop a more complete picture of what he was doing.

We pushed forward furiously in the waning weeks of 1995, gathering more intel, developing ideas and operations. In a perfect world, we would have been able to take him out. It would have saved a lot of lives and massive amounts of resources in the years ahead. That old question: If you could go back in time to 1919 and kill Hitler before he seized power, would you do it? Yeah! I think it haunts all of us in light of what Bin Laden did to America and the world in the years that followed.

Not that there were no attempts on his life. Osama had plenty of friends in the shadows, but he also made plenty of enemies. In 1994, an assassination team tried to kill him while he attended his local mosque in Khartoum. He was late, they were early. A number of innocents died in a hail of gunfire, but Bin Laden escaped harm. The assassins were either killed or captured and then executed.

Given what we knew about him, we settled on a two-front strategy. First, we would hit him where it hurt: his finances. Using every resource at our disposal, Alec Station intended to identify his financial networks and nodes and destroy them. Remove his millions, and what would Bin Laden be? A terrorist Ford Foundation without an endowment.

Second, we needed more information on him. We needed eyes on the ground watching him, seeing who came and went to his upscale compound in the run-down, free-for-all city he now called home. That mission would fall to Cofer Black, our then Chief of Station in Sudan. He had an exceptional team of officers in place, including revered Special Forces veteran and CIA contractor Billy Waugh, already playing a guts game against the Arabs protecting Bin Laden. They’d step up their surveillance of the target in the months ahead.

Of course, if some foreign actor or nation wanted Bin Laden dead, who were we to get in their way? XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXxxxxxxxxxxX

As we finalized our initial effort against Bin Laden, our “front office” asked me to transmit our intent to our allies. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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Ultimately, I briefed almost every one of our allies on Osama bin Laden.

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX They hated Bin Laden with abiding passion for all the chaos and death he and al-Zawahiri had inflicted with their attacks. They were willing to help. This was not the case with other erstwhile “allies.” I soon found that out as I traveled from country to country.

A week later, I flew to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

They met our briefing team with wide grins and open arms. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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I outlined our intention to go after Bin Laden’s financial network, sketched what we knew about him, and signaled our desire to enlist them in our effort. They smiled and nodded and said they’d of course provide whatever support they could.

It all seemed transparently bullshit.

That night, we were invited to a banquet XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Everyone enjoyed the finest beef, lobster, fruits, sinful desserts XXXXXXXXXXX. It was over the top and made me supremely uncomfortable.

At the dinner, an anonymous member of our host’s party made his personal sentiments clear with a symbolic token strategically placed on the table. I picked it up at the end of the meal and tucked it in a pocket.

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Back in Virginia, I returned to our virtual station and went to see Winston and Jeff. I walked into their office and dropped the item on Winston’s desk. He stared down at it for a long moment, saying nothing. Message received.

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