CHAPTER TWO
THE SPOOKS’ WAR
Two and a half months after the 9/11 attacks, a tiny CIA unit commanded by decorated operations officer Gary Berntsen had tracked Osama bin Laden and the top al Qaeda leadership to a cave complex at Tora Bora, in the White Mountains on Afghanistan’s rugged eastern border with Pakistan. Although Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had pledged to deploy Pakistan ground troops to prevent bin Laden from escaping, they were slow to arrive.
Camped at the base of the forbidding snow-covered mountain range with an Afghan tribal force led by a Pashtun warlord named Nuruddin, Berntsen realized that at the rate they were advancing, bin Laden was going to escape. “We need U.S. soldiers on the ground! We need them to do the fighting! We need them to block a possible al Qaeda escape into Pakistan!” Berntsen thought frantically as he watched the al Qaeda men slip away. But when he called for reinforcements to CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan campaign, he got a resounding no. Franks was willing to send B-52s with 15,000 pound “daisy cutter” bombs to pound the al Qaeda caves, but he refused to send troops. The 1,200 troops he had on the ground by that point in Kandahar already had their hands full. “Let the tribals do it,” he told Berntsen.1
Berntsen’s account of the battle of Tora Bora is devastating. The opportunity to get bin Laden and the top al Qaeda leadership when they were all assembled in one place would never come again. Or so it appeared.
Franks continued to play the good soldier, taking blame for that failure upon himself. That was not the case with Berntsen’s superiors at CIA. They leaked the whole story to the Washington Post on April 17, 2002, well before Berntsen came home to publish his eyewitness account.
“We had a good piece of SIGINT,” or signals intelligence, an unnamed official told the Post.2 The leakers told the story of bin Laden addressing an apology by radio to his troops for having led them into a trap, before splitting them into two groups and leading half of them to safety to the north. Some reports said a group of them then fled to Iran.3
The disclosure was clearly aimed at embarrassing President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who were constantly being asked what had happened to bin Laden. At a Pentagon briefing the day the leak appeared, Rumsfeld repeated what Franks’s spokesman, Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, had told the Post. “We have never seen anything that was convincing to us at all that Osama bin Laden was present at any stage of Tora Bora—before, during or after,” Quigley said. “I know you’ve got voices in the intelligence community that are taking a different view, but I just wanted you to know our view as well. Truth is hard to come by in Afghanistan.”
That was too much for Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin, who had seen the bin Laden intercept and read all of Gary Berntsen’s angry reports from the field. “We knew they’d scatter to Pakistan, or Iran, or Somalia, or Sudan, or Syria, or Yemen. They might go to Indonesia,” he said. “Once they dispersed, that was really the start of the ‘war on terror’ as we know it. A war that we were just then learning how to fight—and the one we’re still fighting.”4
The theme McLaughlin sounded would become a familiar routine from top CIA officials over the next two and a half years. Don’t blame us. Blame Bush.
THE FIRST “SECRET” PRISONER
One of the first terrorists to scatter was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, a Libyan-born al Qaeda member who reportedly ran the al-Khaldan training camp, one of bin Laden’s largest facilities in Afghanistan. Captured in Pakistan on November 11, 2001, with help from the CIA, he was interrogated initially at the Kandahar airport. Sometime in December, it appears, he was flown out for safekeeping to the USS Bataan, an amphibious assault ship where other detainees were then being held.5
The capture of al-Libi posed a unique problem for the United States government. Unlike John Walker Lindh and the Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, al-Libi had no affiliation with a state. By no stretch of the imagination was he covered by the Geneva Conventions, as government lawyers argued that the Taliban fighters should be.
Newsweek later reported that FBI officials on the ground in Afghanistan had tried to retain control over al-Libi, and clashed with the CIA team in Afghanistan. The FBI wanted to interrogate al-Libi in a controlled fashion, alternating inducements and gentle pressure, and didn’t like what they were hearing about the CIA’s threats to turn him over to the Egyptian government for torture. The CIA officer who was handling al-Libi appealed to his boss back in Washington, counterterrorism chief Cofer Black, who took the case to Tenet directly. Tenet, in turn, appealed to the White House, which ruled in his favor. Al-Libi’s mouth was duct-taped shut, and he was taken to the airport to be sent to Cairo. “So we lost that fight,” a former FBI official said.6
Thus began the saga of the CIA’s “secret prisons.” When details of the prisons began to leak in May 2004, including their whereabouts and the top-secret proprietary companies used by the CIA to shield the ownership of aircraft used to transport the al Qaeda detainees, former Agency operatives protested that they had been forced to carry out illegal operations against their will.
“This is not what we do,” one twenty-five-year veteran of the clandestine service told me. “The vast majority of our guys are opposed to torture. It’s not who we are. And it’s bad business.”
In one published account, McLaughlin and his partisans simply reinvented history and blamed Rumsfeld for forcing CIA to set up the secret prisons. Tenet had gone to Rumsfeld in the autumn of 2001 asking DoD to help with the growing number of al Qaeda captives, they claimed, but Rumsfeld was unmoved and said that DoD was “not getting into the prison business.” Tenet’s team greeted the news of Rumsfeld’s purported refusal with “groans of disbelief. ‘Once again, we’re the default—left holding the bag,’ said one. ‘This is not what we’re good at,’ said another.”7
At best, these are selective, self-serving recollections. Remember that the Defense Department opened a high-security prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, that took in hundreds of high-value al Qaeda prisoners who had been captured on the battlefield. If the CIA truly felt so bad about holding prisoners in secret, they could have shipped their detainees to Gitmo and been done with it.
At worst, they demonstrate a willingness on the part of top CIA officials to betray the secrets of their own agency and their own government at a time when they believed it would do maximum political damage to the president of the United States.
A “PRIVATE WORD” WITH TOMMY FRANKS
Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) was eager to take up that CIA offer to blame Bush.
Thanks to the defection of Vermont’s Republican U.S. senator Jim Jeffords on May 24, 2001, the Democrats now had a one-vote majority in the Senate (50 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and 1 Independent—Jeffords). On June 6, the day Jeffords’s party-switch became effective, Graham became chairman of the Senate Select intelligence committee. In that position, he was one of two U.S. senators briefed on every sensitive counterterrorism operation being planned or carried out by the U.S. government.
He was briefed on the battle of Tora Bora as it took place, and was well aware that high-value prisoners were being taken to Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo. He was also briefed on the intelligence they provided to their interrogators about the 9/11 plot.
On February 19, 2002, Graham met with General Franks at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, for a briefing on the war in Afghanistan. MacDill was the home of the U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, which had responsibility for all military operations in the Middle East and South Asia.
Graham says he had never met General Franks before, and he was surprised when the Army four-star asked him to join him for a “private word” in his office after they had gone through the PowerPoint briefing on Afghanistan in the amphitheater.
“Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,” Franks confided to Graham. Even the CIA’s Predator drones, which were operated by the Air Force, were being redeployed to the Iraq theater, he said. “What we are doing is a manhunt,” Franks complained, referring to the continuing Afghan operations. “We’re better at being a meat ax than finding a needle in a haystack. That’s not our mission, and that’s not what we are trained or prepared to do.”
Graham said he was “stunned” to hear this from General Franks, but remember the date. By this time, the Taliban had been smashed, al Qaeda had been scattered to the winds, and a pro-American government led by Hamid Karzai was taking shape in Kabul. Of course it was time to redeploy. But that’s not how armchair general Bob Graham saw it.
“The more I thought about it, the more furious I became. Victory against al Qaeda was in our grasp, and we were releasing the pressure,” he wrote.8
As Graham told me later, he believed “the Bush administration had a mind-set that it wanted to go to war with Saddam Hussein without regard to the relative severity of his threat.”
Graham said if he had been in charge (and he ran for president in 2004), he would have focused on “several evils in the Middle East that were more threatening to U.S. interests than Iraq.”
Among his potential targets? “We skipped over Iran, which was much further along in its development of WMD than Iraq has turned out to be. We skipped over Hezbollah, which is probably going to be the shock forces of Iran in its support of the Shiites. We skipped over Hamas, which now has taken over the Palestinian government. All those were clearly greater threats to the U.S. than Iraq, but we decided to not only spend our resources on Iraq but pay the price on ignoring the greater threats, and that price is now being paid.”
So imagine this: With Senator Graham as president, the United States would have left Saddam Hussein in power but would have waged war against Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority, because they all were run by terrorists or harbored terrorist groups.
And he thinks we angered the rest of the world by taking out Saddam Hussein?
“TOMORROW IS ZERO HOUR”
Congressional Democrats have always excelled at conducting hard-hitting political investigations, a skill their GOP colleagues seem to lack. The Democrats know how to use all the tools available to congressional committees—even when they are in the minority—to subpoena documents and testimony from government officials, corporate honchos, and whomever they decide to paint as Villain-of-the-Day.
Their bloodlust for impeachable acts committed by the Reagan White House during the Iran-Contra scandal outlasted Reagan’s presidency by four years! Similarly, an investigation launched early in 2001 into potential “secret agreements” between Vice President Dick Cheney and oil industry executives at White House energy task force meetings during the early months of the administration simmers along to this day. Allegations that Cheney still works for Halliburton (he was CEO of the oil field services company until 2000) and profits personally from their contracts in Iraq can be found all over the Internet, fueled by documents obtained by Democratic congressional investigators and Judicial Watch, and by the heavy breathing of elected Democrats such as Senator Carl Levin and Representative Henry Waxman.*4 By comparison, Republican investigations into Whitewater were halfhearted and inconclusive, while the impeachment hearings of Bill Clinton were an utter failure and totally missed the real scandal of the Clinton years, which was the sell-off of military secrets and technology to Communist China.
By going after Cheney and the inner workings of the White House before 9/11, the Democrats were casting about for potential scandals that could throw the new administration off-balance. As time went on, and these efforts became more organized and involved the compromise of national security secrets, they became a conscious effort to undermine and subvert the elected government of the United States, carried out by a legion of shadow warriors.
A glimpse of things to come occurred within hours of a closed-door hearing on June 19, 2002, that was part of the first 9/11 inquiry, conducted jointly by the Senate and the House intelligence committees.
That morning, the Joint Inquiry heard Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency, testify about al Qaeda messages the NSA had intercepted on September 10, 2001, but had not translated until the day after the September 11 attacks.
“The match begins tomorrow,” one of the messages read. “Tomorrow is zero hour,” went another.
The messages were dramatic, and the Democrats jumped all over them as evidence that the Bush team had missed a vital warning of the impending attacks. Just hours after General Hayden completed his closed-door testimony, his classified remarks—including the text of the NSA intercepts—were broadcast on CNN by reporter David Ensor.
Senator Bob Graham, who was the Senate chair of the Joint Inquiry, acknowledged the leak, which he told me made him “livid.” But he blamed it inexplicably on a White House effort to “sabotage” the 9/11 investigation, an allegation he admitted made him look like “a conspiracy theorist.”
CNN’s David Ensor credited their Capitol Hill producer, Dana Bash, with the scoop. What he didn’t report was that Bash was married to a top Democratic staff lawyer working for House intelligence committee cochair Jane Harman (D-CA).
“As committee counsel, Bash’s husband would have had access to all the sensitive intelligence,” a former committee staffer told me. “He didn’t have to leak classified information to his wife—just give her enough information so she could ask sensitive questions that would embarrass Bush, and there couldn’t legally be any questions.” That’s not necessarily what happened in this instance, but it was how the shadow warriors operated.
The leaked NSA intercepts were all over the Washington Post and USA Today the next morning, and provided ammunition to Democrats who accused the Bush administration of having missed the warning signs of the September 11 attacks. But if they were a White House effort to stymie the Joint Inquiry, they failed. Democrats and Republicans asked the FBI to investigate the source of the leak, and continued their inquiry into the 9/11 attacks as if nothing had happened.
In the end, no indictments were ever announced. Indeed, if a member of Congress was the source of the leak—and remember, CNN cited congressional sources for the information—then no punishable crime had been committed. (The only punishment for members of Congress who divulge classified information is for their party leadership to remove them from the intelligence committee.)
INTELLIGENCE MATTERS
After 9/11, classified intelligence information increasingly became a part of the American political discourse.
How many people had ever heard of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) before the 9/11 Commission hearings? And yet today it has become an article of faith that President Bush ignored an explicit warning, contained in the August 6, 2001, PDB, that Osama bin Ladin was planning to use civilian airliners as weapons and crash them into major U.S. buildings. (When the White House finally declassified the PDB in its entirety, it turned out to have contained no such warning—only the misleading title “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”)9
Then–national security advisor Condoleezza Rice accurately described the PDB article when she told the 9/11 Commission that it contained mostly “old intelligence.” Even its opening line showed it was a backgrounder, not a sizzling new intelligence item. “Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate bin Ladin since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.,” it read. Bush’s reaction was that it contained no “actionable intelligence,” nothing that even suggested an imminent attack. “It said Osama bin Ladin had designs on America. Well, I knew that,” Bush said. “What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to.”10
Intelligence mattered, as Senator Bob Graham liked to say. And increasingly, Democrats showed themselves willing to use it—and to leak it, when it fit their political purposes, to attack the president of the United States.
Three months after the NSA leaks, Senator Carl Levin—who also sat on the Senate intelligence committee and the Joint Inquiry—blasted the White House for not declassifying the identity of the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, whom he said had been known to the intelligence community “since 1995.” Levin vowed to use the Joint Senate-House Inquiry into the 9/11 attacks, on which he sat, to officially reveal the terrorist’s name and his role in the 9/11 plot—a move that could have compromised efforts then under way by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence to capture Mohammed in Pakistan. Levin argued that Mohammed’s name and role were already known to the press, so it made no sense for them to remain classified.11
In the end, Levin backed off from his threat to give high-profile exposure to Mohammed, and the CIA nabbed him together with other top al Qaeda operatives at a safe house in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in January 2003. The U.S. government detailed Mohammed’s role in the 9/11 plot almost immediately upon his capture, making a mockery of Levin’s contention of a political cover-up.
But can anyone think for an instant that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed would have stayed put in Pakistan if Senator Levin had revealed in public that the CIA was hot on his trail, as had been his intention? The fact that Levin could conceive of doing so clearly shows that he placed partisan political gain well before the national interest.