Alec Station
1995–1996
In any good spy thriller, once the bad guy has been identified, the logical next step is to take them out. A bad guy like Dr. No or Goldfinger always gets whacked in the end, and James Bond emerges unscathed with the woman and his shaken, not stirred, martini.
Osama bin Laden lived openly in the terrorist haven that Khartoum was in the 1990s. He worshipped at the same mosque every day, he stuck to a surprisingly rigid schedule that saw him taking the same routes around the city. He even drove his white Mercedes sedan alone quite frequently. With tradecraft this bad, he was a bad guy looking for a bullet. Except there was no Agency officer to pull the trigger.
You can thank President Gerald Ford for that. On February 18, 1976, he signed Executive Order 11905, which prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency from carrying out political assassinations. Two years later, Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12036, which went further and banned indirect United States involvement in assassinations.
Billy Waugh wanted to kill Bin Laden. He had many opportunities to do so while he shadowed the terror leader from 1992 to 1994. Once, he even jogged past Bin Laden as he got out of his Mercedes in front of his residence. Billy figured a two-car operation with only a few officers could trap him on a Khartoum street and assassinate him in his car. No security. No bodyguards. Lawless city. Easy day.
No matter how easy it would have been, there was no legal mechanism to do it. And in the post–Cold War, post-Iran-Contra atmosphere at the CIA, nobody was willing to run an operation that directly contravened two executive orders.
Aside from Billy’s personal initiative, there was no formal Agency capability to even carry out such attacks. Unlike the Jason Bourne pulp fiction version of the CIA, we had no assassins on the payroll, so killing Bin Laden was not a realistic option for the CIA of 1996.
With that off the table, our best move against him remained going after his financial empire. At our virtual station, we knew terrorists would come to him for financing and support for their operations. He would dispense the funds and equipment needed for the mission. Yet he was not one to get his hands personally dirty or get directly involved in an operation—not after 1989 Afghanistan anyway.
It took us months to unravel how his own organization, which later we identified as al-Qaeda, fit into this overall picture. It seemed so decentralized, yet global, diverse, yet all roads pointed back to the man in Khartoum. Eventually, we figured it out. He was the Lucky Luciano of terrorism.
Luciano was the first Mafia godfather who pulled non-Italians and non-Catholics into his organization. He was the color-blind Don who cared only about loyalty to purpose and the organization. Bin Laden was the same way. We discovered his connections with Filipinos, Somalis, Saudis, Algerians, Egyptians, Afghans, Pakistanis, and organizations from all over the world. They had one thing that bound them together: holy war. To Bin Laden, jihad was the great revitalizing engine for Islam in the modern age. Who the jihad was against—be it the United States, the Algerian, Egyptian or Philippine government—didn’t matter. Ideology and sense of mission did. For those who drank the radical jihadist Kool-Aid, Bin Laden was the great financial provider, the master behind the scenes, manipulating and shaping with strategic use of his massive wealth.
Cut him off from his financial resources, and his whole network would shrivel. But how could we do that? The CIA possessed no capability to search, discover, and interdict Bin Laden’s global financial web. Such things were left to other governmental agencies like the Treasury Department. This new mission became the greatest challenge Alec Station faced in its first months after inception. We needed to build our own counter–financial operation that could pinpoint Bin Laden’s resources and follow the money trails.
This would not be accomplished overnight—it took years, in fact—but Alec Station’s requirement planted the seed that would give birth to a quantum leap in the science of identifying, tracking, and interdicting illicit funding worldwide.
Fast forward to 2000. By then, I was Chief of the International Terrorism Group in the CTC. One of our officers, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, had been an investment banker prior to joining the Agency. “Phil” was an eccentric chap in a lot of ways; a Wall Street type thrown into a mix of meat eaters and wicked-smart analysts. He was a genius, but a loner who never quite fit in. Always meticulously dressed in a black suit and driving a pristine, freshly waxed Mercedes, he was the quintessential anal-retentive perfectionist. That made him the perfect man for this mission. He played a key role in what we developed in the months ahead.
He took the lead on constructing the CTC’s new capabilities from scratch. He asked questions, threw out ideas, and, most importantly, shared his knowledge of the financial world with us—something most of us knew little about. He pioneered the system we used to follow the terrorist money trail. It was Phil’s ideas and input that helped us get past Bin Laden’s—and other terrorists’—myriad of holding companies, fake accounts, cover businesses, and so on to find where his money was and how he was moving it around. He personally stimulated the development of state-of-the-art technologies for tracking financial activities that became the intel community’s envy.
In 1996, we laid the foundations for what Phil eventually created by detecting and documenting the first of Bin Laden’s financial tentacles. Our goal was to mesh operational work with the computer skills at our virtual station. Though Billy Waugh had moved on to other assignments, our Chief of Station in Khartoum made sure to keep Bin Laden under frequent surveillance. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Those tidbits from the field gave us ideas and avenues back in Virginia to explore.
It was difficult, byzantine work that never yielded anything close to a complete picture, but we did find pieces of his network. Based on what we developed, Mike conceived further ops against Bin Laden. Many times, the seventh floor—where the senior CIA leadership worked—killed those ideas for being too aggressive or reckless. Other times, the White House did the same. It was the nature of the 1990s. The Agency’s senior leadership and our presidential administration defaulted to risk-averse policies overseas. We were hindered by that at times. Yet the CTC’s leadership never wavered in supporting Alec Station’s efforts.
Part of my role in the team was to serve as a foil to Mike’s operational ideas. Being a field officer, I brought a different perspective from Mike’s, and it allowed me to suggest a different way of going about something. I’d put the operational realities spin on things, then we’d run it up the flagpole. Unfortunately, too often, we’d be denied.
These were tough months for me and for my family. Mike worked sixty-hour weeks minimum and attacked our mission with all the zeal of a religious adherent. More than anyone else, he saw in Bin Laden a clear and present danger to the United States. Inside the Agency, he was an evangelical force, fighting the bureaucracy as he tried to get the seventh floor to pay attention and recognize the extent of the danger.
When your boss plows through his day with that level of intensity, everyone steps in line—or gets out. We worked harder at Alec Station than just about any other time in my professional life. Even after twelve- or fourteen-hour days at the office, we’d return home only to have work follow us there.
Normally, back in the States, if a department or individual wanted to send a cable out to another station, it had to go through a layered chain of command. It could be a long and cumbersome bureaucratic process to send and receive those crucial communications with our people in overseas hotspots. Alec Station broke that bureaucratic system down. As a virtual station, we could send and receive cables on our own without having to go through the internal chain of command inside the building at Langley. This may seem like a trivial bureaucratic thing. In truth, having the ability to communicate freely with stations all over the world was like a wand of power for us. We could ask questions, get answers, request actions, get results faster than any other Agency organization stateside. It gave us speed, it gave us flexibility, and it sometimes gave us real-time actionable information with very little lag time.
Because of that capability, often we would get Need Immediate Action Cables (NIACs) in the middle of the night. Early on, this meant I’d be sound asleep in bed and the phone would ring. The voice on the other end of the line would tell Mike or me a NIAC had just arrived. One of us would throw on some clothes and drive into our office complex to handle it.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Mike’s pace pushed most of us to the edge of exhaustion. We relished the work. We believed in the mission and its urgency. But the commitment was not for everyone.
As we got up and running, events overseas moved swiftly. For months, U.S., Egyptian, and Saudi pressure on the government of Sudan had been ramped up as a result of Bin Laden’s operations. Seeking an easing of that pressure—and an opening to ask for aid money—the Sudanese approached U.S. officials and asked what they could do to thaw relations between the two countries.
Expelling Bin Laden stood at the top of our list, as well as the Saudis’. The government of Sudan at first offered to send him back to Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis refused. They’d already stripped him of citizenship and sent him into exile for his anti-monarchist activities. Though he had plenty of friends or supporters in high places in the Saudi regime, bringing him home was not an option.
In May 1996, the Sudanese government pushed Bin Laden out the door. He had only one place to go: back to Afghanistan. His departure was forced and swift, mainly so the Sudanese government could sweep up his assets. The fact is, the Sudanese regime, which Bin Laden greased so generously with millions of dollars’ worth of bribes, made out like bandits by kicking him out of their country. He left behind all his local businesses, his farm, his construction equipment, and all his property. He had very little time to sell anything. What wasn’t just abandoned, he liquidated for a fraction of their worth. We never knew exactly how much the Sudanese clipped Osama for, but it reportedly could have been upward of $300 million.
With his financial empire struck a major blow, Bin Laden faced other challenges as well after leaving Sudan. He had since been opposed by another radical Islamic group known as the Takfiris. They tried to kill him on several occasions in Khartoum. They tried again and failed shortly after he returned to Afghanistan. Subsequently, other would-be assassins made clumsy efforts to kill him. All unsuccessful.
That summer, Bin Laden issued his fatwa and declaration of war against the United States, citing our presence in the Middle East. He quickly orchestrated a terrorist fundraising drive from Afghanistan, tapping into donors and networks he’d developed during the war against the Soviets in the 1980s. He was assisted by elements inside Pakistan XXXXXXXXXXXXX and by the Taliban, who proved to be ideological fellow travelers with Bin Laden. With the Taliban’s support, he virtually took over Ariana Afghan Airlines, the country’s only air carrier. He quickly turned it into what Mike called “a terrorist taxi service.” Its aging fleet of Russian-made aircraft routinely started transporting jihadists, weapons, ammunition, cash, and Afghan opium through Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. While he took a significant financial hit leaving Sudan, having his own air transport capability supercharged his effort to spread holy war throughout the world. In Afghanistan, he was also much safer from us.
In Khartoum, at least we could keep eyes on Bin Laden, but once he returned to Afghanistan, our ability to conduct surveillance degraded considerably. Ultimately, that led the CIA to reach out to Ahmad Shah Massoud, an old ally from the Soviet-Afghan War who by then led the opposition to the Taliban known as the Northern Alliance.
He was safe in Afghanistan, protected by his Taliban friends, and our opportunity to take him out had passed.
Mike grew increasingly frustrated after Bin Laden’s declaration of war. We had adequate funding and resources, but the bureaucracy at Langley stood like a stone wall against the things he wanted to do to counter the Saudi terrorist. The best officers and leaders that I knew at the Agency were black belts in bureaucracy. They were well versed in the subtle art of maneuvering to achieve their objectives—who to cultivate, who to talk to, how to do it, where to go for support and resources—it is a crucial skill to have for anyone working in a large organization. Mike didn’t have that skill. He attacked bureaucracy head-on, bull-rushing it with the belief that sheer force of will and determination would get the results he wanted. Too often, it did not. Instead, it burned some bridges for him, and he gradually turned bitter.
At the same time, the threat Bin Laden posed increased dramatically. In November, a bomb planted under a bridge in the Philippines narrowly missed killing President Bill Clinton, who was there for a series of economic meetings. The bomb conspiracy led back to Bin Laden, though that wasn’t revealed publicly until a decade later.
Early the next year, as Bin Laden’s war against the United States began to heat up, my family suffered a serious medical crisis that demanded my attention. The frantic pace at Alec Station was something I couldn’t maintain and deal with my family’s situation simultaneously. It forced me to make a choice. I love my country, I loved my job and career, but my family always came first in such situations. With great reluctance, I went to Mike, explained my situation, and told him I needed to be reassigned to something with a more regular schedule. He understood and was very sorry to see me go. As a parting gift, he gave me a book that he inscribed:
Ric, for the rest of my career, your departure will serve as irrefutable proof that nothing changes for the better. Please accept my sincere thanks and know that my respect, affection, and admiration go with you. God Bless you and yours always.
Scheuer.
I moved over to serve as the Deputy Chief of the CTC’s Management Group, which oversaw all personnel, budget and fiscal, security, and logistics for the CTC. For the next seven months, I worked an average 0700–1700 desk job with no midnight calls. Initially, I missed the action, but I soon came to love the job. It gave me newfound respect for the support elements that make all ops possible. I also got to see the quality of people in the group, many of whom I’m still friends with to this day. Honorable mention to my then boss, Roy P., and our Chief of Personnel, Stephany—they were great leaders beloved by their crew.
Not long after our family medical crisis stabilized, King Ralph asked me to come back and work East Asia Division, initially as his XO (executive officer) and subsequently, against the North Koreans again. I gladly headed back into the fray.
Meanwhile, Alec Station remained the central clearinghouse for all things Bin Laden for years to come. I was proud to have been a plank owner with Mike and the other members of the team. We laid the foundation for the pursuit and destruction of al-Qaeda, a fight that some of us saw through to the end in 2011 when, based on CIA/CTC, UBL Task Force, intelligence, Bin Laden was finally killed by a Naval Special Warfare team in Pakistan.
It was a pursuit that came at a heavy cost to our old team, however. Mike’s frustrations with the Agency and the Bush administration’s policies erupted after 9/11. He penned, anonymously, a furious book entitled Imperial Hubris after the invasion of Iraq. Embittered by his bureaucratic battles, he turned on some of the very people who’d supported him for years. He left the Agency in 2004 and became an outspoken critic of it. He published several more books, but became increasingly shrill in his public comments, and that alienated most of his old colleagues. I tried to reach out to him for years to no avail. I finally stopped after watching a documentary where during an interview he harshly criticized the ops officers of our original team and the Directorate of Operations in general. Seeing him say those things wounded me deeply and forced me to shelve my admiration of Scheuer.
Our targeting officers pursued Bin Laden for years, long after the USS Cole had been bombed, our two embassies in Africa blown up, and of course, 9/11. Jennifer Matthews, among a few select others, became the institutional encyclopedia of all things Bin Laden after Mike left the Agency. They worked to track him and al-Qaeda from late 1995 until the Obama years.
In 2009, Jennifer was sent to be Chief of Base at Khost, Afghanistan’s Camp Chapman, the Agency’s hub in theater for pursuing Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Keep in mind, Jenn was an analyst, not a field officer. She’d been deployed on temporary duty overseas a few times in the past, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, but she hadn’t been trained operationally for the field. But Khost was where the Bin Laden action was, and her senior-most superior gave her the base.
On December 30, 2009, a Jordanian asset who appeared to have high-level information on al-Qaeda and Bin Laden was brought to Khost. XXXXXXXXXXXX
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XXXXXXXXX Jenn was eager to meet and debrief him. She gave orders to the base security that he was to be treated with trust and respect. There would be no searching his vehicle when he arrived, and no pat-down of his person.
Dr. Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the asset, was picked up at the Pakistan border by Camp Chapman’s Chief of External Security and driven to the base. The vehicle passed three layers of security checkpoints, where they were waved through as per Jenn’s orders. When the car arrived at the heart of the base, sixteen people, including the Deputy Station Chief for Kabul, were waiting together for the doctor’s arrival.
When the car stopped beside the waiting crowd, al-Balawi got out and detonated a suicide vest. Nine people in the crowd died in the blast.
Medics helicoptered all the victims, including Jennifer, to nearby FOB Salerno, where an air force surgeon named Dr. Joshua Alley fought desperately to save her life. She arrived with massive shrapnel wounds to her abdomen and neck, one leg broken and shredded by the explosion. She had no pulse. They tried to open an airway, but her wounds were too severe. She died on the operating table.
It was one of the worst days in CIA history. Seven of our brothers and sisters perished in the attack. A subsequent investigation discovered we’d been played all along. Al-Balawi was a triple agent, to whom the Taliban and al-Qaeda fed real and actionable intelligence in order to build his credibility in the eyes of his handlers. They sacrificed some of their own people to establish al-Balawi’s value and get him passed up to their real target: the CIA base at Camp Chapman. It was an extraordinarily ruthless and cunning operation. Both al-Qaeda and the Taliban publicly took credit for the attack in its aftermath.
The loss of our friends and colleagues was already enough of a gut punch to last a lifetime. Jenn’s death still wears on me, and I know it lingers in others, too. She was an extraordinary officer and patriot whose death proved a major setback to our effort to find and kill Bin Laden. She was also a dear friend to us all.
I was long gone from the Agency when all this happened, so I am in no position to pass judgment. However, according to very senior colleagues active at the time, this incident could have been avoided. If the standard security procedures had been used, there was no way al-Balawi would have gotten close to Jenn and the others waiting for him. Instead, basic procedures were waived for fear they would be seen by a VIP asset as a sign of disrespect.
The Agency studied the debacle and conducted a thorough investigation. A litany of lessons learned came out of it, but I am told that nobody suffered any career consequences. Perhaps there were none to be had, just hard lessons to be learned and never forgotten.