Langley, Virginia
July–September 2001
I returned home from Shangri-La to find Carmen and the boys in good shape. My oldest was already doing two-a-day workouts in the Virginia heat, preparing for his last season of high school football. My youngest boy was just about to start his freshman year at Fairfax High and was trying out with the freshman squad’s defense. I knew with the job I would soon be taking that I wouldn’t be traveling as much as in the past. After all the moves, the foreign stations, the long nights away from the family, I’d have the opportunity to attend my sons’ games and spend more time with them.
I was fifty years old now, and that night I’d crossed the bridge with my grandfather in Cuba seemed like a distant memory. We’d moved on from the Cold War to an even more uncertain world still taking shape around us. For me personally, lots of change seemed in the works, too. I was starting the last third of my career, heading toward a new role in the CIA that would take me out of the field. Mandatory retirement age in the CIA is sixty years old. That gave me ten years left. I intended to make them as exciting and meaningful as the first twenty. One thing was clear: it was time for me to grow up and do some senior headquarters (HQS) time. That meant I’d be riding a desk, but I figured I could sneak away and get in the field once in a while.
I have never allowed myself much time to be sentimental or nostalgic. I’d learned a long time ago that you can’t cling to the phases of life as they come and go. They are to be experienced as you keep moving forward, setting goals and staying on the path God intended for you. Still, it was hard not to get a little choked up when I thought of these past decades. The orphan from Cuba, the street kid from Miami. The Pararescueman whom the Agency rolled the bones with and gave me a life like none other. I was grateful for every phase, every experience. The way ahead? I’d never planned my career. I’d never looked down the road. I just kept focused on doing the best I could in the job I had, throwing my heart and mind into every assignment. That paid off throughout my career, and I was blessed with promotions and opportunities I will always cherish. But it was never planned.
The path I walked had always been made clear to me. Even in moments where I was at my most lost, there were signs that pointed me in the direction I needed to travel. And yes, some of the paths—like leaving Cuba or my divorce—were painful parts on the way to my chosen path. Now, as I entered the last decade of my Agency career, I was not about to coast to the finish line. I wanted to be in the fight in whatever way I could contribute. Beyond that, I knew the path would reveal itself, so I didn’t dwell on the uncertainties that lay over the horizon.
Fortunately, the next couple of years were already in focus for me, thanks to Hank Crumpton and Cofer Black. When I returned to Langley, the coolest management job for any action-loving ops officer awaited me: Chief of Operations for the CTC. Hank had just moved out of that slot to become a Chief of Station overseas. The job was mine now. This made me the third-ranking officer in CTC under Cofer and Ben. We were the leadership cadre, spearheading America’s effort against global terrorism.
If I had to take a desk job, this was the one to take. It was an incredible opportunity that gave me a chance to help evolve our response to terrorism’s growing threat. It would also give me the opportunity to help groom future CT officers and maybe even get me in the field from time to time.
After all, age is not as big a factor in our profession as it is in the more kinetic careers. In the “special” side of the military, few officers will be leading action after making major (0–4).
First days on the job found me thrust into a new realm of political and administration battles. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence wanted to know why we were funding the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and giving them helicopter parts. Apparently, some of the committee members thought the Northern Alliance was composed of a bunch of drug smugglers. I had to explain to them the drug runners and poppy growers in Afghanistan operated in the south, protected by the Taliban. They also didn’t seem to realize that the Northern Alliance was our only real ally in that country.
Meanwhile, we faced friction with the U.S Air Force on a critical program. The USAF kept wanting to charge us ridiculous amounts of money for the Predator drone modifications the Agency wanted to develop. Cofer believed in those mods and knew the Predator could become a deadly effective weapon against terrorists. Yet at times, Cofer grew so upset with the way the military behaved that he threatened to abandon the program altogether. Fortunately, he was never serious, and Ben always talked him off the ledge. But those meetings led to a lot of fireworks. In the end, the Predator XXXXXX turned out to be one of the most important assets XXXXXXXXXX
The Predator was born after the Gulf War as a joint project between the CIA and the USAF. The CIA wanted a light surveillance platform that could loiter for hours undetected above bad guys, observing them with a sensor suite that included high-resolution video camera technology. The Predator fit the bill perfectly. It was light, quiet, small, and hard to see. With its fuel-efficient propeller-driven engine, it was capable of spending hours over a target. After al-Qaeda’s attacks in the late 1990s, the CIA wanted to enhance the platform into something more than just a surveillance asset.
Starting in 2000, the USAF and the CIA worked together to develop an armed version of the Predator that could carry two AGM-114 Hellfire antitank missiles. While I was in Shangri-La, the first live-fire test was conducted in February 2001 outside of Las Vegas. Three missiles launched, three hits. It was a great success, XXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXX advocating using the new weapon system to hunt Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Just before I returned to Langley, the CIA and USAF created a replica of Bin Laden’s Afghan compound at Tarnak out in the Nevada desert. There they ran simulated, then live-fire attacks on it with armed Predators, scoring a hit on a targeted room in the compound with a well-placed missile shot.
For all the potential, working with the air force was a constant strain for Cofer and Ben. At one point, coming out of a briefing after the air force demanded the CIA inject more money into the program, Cofer exclaimed, “Fuck them! I can’t justify taking any more money from other operations. We’re bailing on the Predator!” I looked at Ben, whose eyes told me: Don’t say a word, I’ll take care of it.
Despite the frustrations, everyone in the building knew the Predator’s potential could not be abandoned. In 1998, after al-Qaeda’s attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Clinton struck back at Bin Laden with Tomahawk barrages aimed at supposed al-Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. These subsonic cruise missiles were launched from ships and did little significant damage to al-Qaeda, though an aspirin factory in Sudan was destroyed. The TLAM (Tomahawk Land Attack Missile) was not accurate enough to conduct the kind of surgical strike conceived as our response in 1998. Worse, one of them failed to detonate when it struck near one of Bin Laden’s training bases in Afghanistan. The terrorists recovered it and sold it to the Chinese, giving a global rival valuable insight into our weapon technology. The incident led directly to the Chinese military developing a copy of it called the CJ-10.
The Hellfire-armed Predator gave us a much more accurate means of striking back at these terror groups. Instead of launched from ships thousands of miles away, the Predator would be in the sky directly over the target area, watching it with its sensor suite and cameras. We would know if the people we needed to take out were on-site or not, unlike with the 1998 TLAM attacks when we just fired the barrage and hoped Bin Laden might get caught in it. (He wasn’t; he’d gone to Kabul.)
The Hellfire was originally designed as an antitank missile for the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter. It was smaller, more maneuverable, and more accurate than the TLAMs. The test program so far was generally quite promising. The Predator looked to be able to fill a niche in XXXXXX antiterrorism toolbox. It was just a headache to develop.
While I experienced a bit of these internal wranglings and politics, my new role as C/OPS consisted mainly of overseeing every operation that the CTC ran. It was an incredible opportunity to get the thirty-thousand-foot perspective of the things we’d been doing in the field for decades. I went from being in the streets, eyeball to eyeball with America’s enemies, to the operations center at Langley where we coordinated the entire counterterror war. Talk about going from a telescopic view to a wide-angle one! The learning curve was often like drinking out of a fire hydrant.
That summer of 2001, the CTC kept eyes on dozens of dangerous groups, everyone from Iran’s Hezbollah Party to the Filipino jihadists of Abu Sayyaf in the Southern Islands who had just unleashed a campaign of kidnappings in June 2001 that included two American missionaries as their victims.
At this level, the CIA operates with delegated authority. The Agency is so large and there are so many people keeping watch on so many different threats that there is literally no other way to run the organization. For me, this meant our Group Chiefs had the authority to conceive, plan, and conduct operations. They kept me in the loop, asked permission when necessary, and carried on with an autonomy not found in many places today. We entrusted our group leaders with great responsibility and flexibility so that they could respond quickly to fast-developing situations.
Each day, I would be briefed by each of the Group Chiefs. They’d give me updates for ongoing operations, latest developments, and resources they might need to carry out missions.
The threats America faced that summer came from many quarters, but two in particular were seen as significant threats. Hezbollah was considered among the most dangerous. They had carried out operations all over the world that killed thousands of people. They also were responsible for the barracks bombing in Beirut in the 1980s that killed 241 U.S. marines. They were well trained in the dark arts of clandestine operations, highly motivated, and thoroughly supported, controlled, and directed by Iran. They represented the worst of the state-sponsored terror groups, and our Hezbollah section included some of our most dedicated and intelligent ops officers and analysts.
Along with Hezbollah, al-Qaeda remained the most immediate threat to the United States. Alec Station was now under “Rich.” His Bin Laden unit reported alarming chatter from the terrorists. Rich and his dedicated team were convinced something big was in the works, but nobody could figure out exactly what it was.
It is hard for average Americans to understand just how difficult intelligence work can be. It is nothing like in the movies, where a set-piece puzzle is assembled throughout the film’s running time. There’s almost never an aha moment where suddenly everything fits into place and the heroes know where the bad guys are and what they’re doing. It just does not work that way.
The intel on al-Qaeda came in penny packets and pieces. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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We didn’t even know what the puzzle was, just that there were an awful lot of pieces that indicated an attack was coming. The CTC was so alarmed that Rich briefed Cofer, Ben, and me three times a week or more on al-Qaeda’s activities. Everyone concurred an attack seemed imminent; that was never in dispute. The problem we faced was how we could penetrate al-Qaeda’s operational security and figuring out what they planned to do.
After the embassy bombings in 1998, al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole in 2000, nearly sinking a U.S. Navy destroyer with a suicide bombing attack. We knew Bin Laden’s organization possessed a global reach. We knew they had the capability to carry out a diverse range of attacks. We knew they counted in their ranks jihadists willing to die in suicide attacks. This made planning an operation against us much easier since the trickiest part of any mission is always the postattack extraction of the team that carried it out. Bin Laden’s attacks so far had been largely one-way missions. That gives them an additional advantage and streamlined their own planning.
Our black ops are designed not to lead back to us. With the proliferation of video cameras, facial recognition systems, traceable travel documents, and so on, post-incident forensics investigations make it extremely difficult to remain anonymous. Terrorists do not have to worry about that. They don’t plan to survive the mission. Besides, they are always ready to take credit for their misdeeds. It is how they achieve fame, recruit adherents, and obtain further funding.
It was a maddening time, not knowing where they would strike. Some of us in the CTC believed Bin Laden would strike at the homeland. Others saw signs of overseas operations. The problem was, we simply did not have enough pieces of the puzzle in front of us.
We just knew they were up to something. That was keeping our analysts up late, culling through thousands upon thousands of cables from our overseas stations, searching for any clue that might give us a thread to pull on.
On September 9, 2001, three Tunisian al-Qaeda operatives posing as Belgian journalists secured an interview with the Afghan leader of the Northern Alliance, the CIA’s old friend Ahmad Shah Massoud (not to be confused with his younger brother, Ahmad Zia, who went on to become vice president of Afghanistan). When the fake reporters arrived, they detonated a bomb concealed in their video camera that mortally wounded Massoud. He later died in a helicopter en route to a hospital outside of Afghanistan. One of the assassins also died in the blast. One was shot and killed trying to escape. The other was captured.
The news electrified the CTC. That al-Qaeda could conceive and execute such an incredibly complex operation as the assassination of the leader of the Afghan resistance left some of us astonished. That was next-level shadow-world ops. I think some in the intel community, even in 2001, viewed these terror groups as second-rate actors in the dark world—the bottom-of-the-barrel types who got lucky once in a while. Lucky? The synchronized bombing of two of our embassies and the Cole was not the work of “camel jockeys”! Still, many believed they were nothing like our oldest and most capable adversary, the KGB.
But this? Killing Massoud like that took vision. What was the objective? Bin Laden was looking at the big picture in Afghanistan. Taking him out redrew the balance between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. It would set the Northern Alliance into disarray until a new leader could unite them again. Plus, it solidified Bin Laden’s relationship with Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, the militant Islamic faction that seized power in Kabul and brought the Afghan Civil War to an end in 1996.
Conceptualizing the attack took considerable understanding of the hardships any assassin would face. Getting close to Massoud would have been difficult. His bodyguards were capable, hardened veterans, totally loyal to their leader. Beyond them, his Northern Alliance headquarters was always filled with scores, if not hundreds, of other loyal fighters. Massoud had survived twenty-six other assassination attempts. He was no easy target.
Bin Laden conceived a means to penetrate that security by preying on Massoud’s one weakness: publicity. The Northern Alliance faced long odds against the Taliban. Massoud needed the world’s help. A news team from Europe eager to interview him seemed like the opening he needed to bring his cause to the attention of the world. It was a devilishly clever scheme. The journalists were not searched, and penetrated Massoud’s headquarters with guile, not guns.
Most impressive of all, somehow al-Qaeda managed to keep this entire operation secret. Bin Laden compartmentalized the mission, and his men adhered to strict operational security protocols. Though we were searching harder than ever for signs of impending al-Qaeda attacks, Massoud’s assassination came as a complete surprise.
If they could do that, what else were they planning? For those of us in the CTC, that question kept us up long into the night of September 10.