Bill Clinton was elected president on a platform of domestic reforms, budget reductions, and new policies regarding gay people in the military. Foreign affairs held little interest for him. Tony Lake, his national security advisor and a former Foreign Service officer, would take care of things. The federal budget cuts continued. It was “the economy, stupid,” and Clinton vowed to improve it.
Soon after his inauguration, two terrorist attacks occurred on U.S. soil. The first took place only a few miles from the White House five days after Clinton took the oath of office. A lone gunman stood at the entrance of CIA headquarters and shot incoming employees. He killed two and wounded three more before making a getaway to Pakistan. A few weeks later, a truck bomb exploded in the underground parking lot of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Six people died, and a thousand were injured. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, got away.
It took only a few days after the bombing for authorities to focus on the al-Kifah Refugee Center and its companion, al-Farooq Mosque. The FBI once again rounded up the men who had been taken into custody and released in the Rabbi Kahane murder case and dusted off the boxes from the assailant’s apartment that had been stored in someone’s office. In them they found classified Special Operations training manuals, secret documents, bomb-making instructions, and maps of New York City and landmarks, along with lots of documents written in Arabic and videotapes of Ali Mohamed’s lectures on Islam.1
Abdel-Rahman, the Blind Sheikh, imam of the al-Farooq Mosque, was hauled into custody. He was already under suspicion after Egyptian authorities told the FBI that his gang, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, was behind the attack on western tourists in November 1992. The Egyptians also shared information on a plot to kill Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak during a planned visit to New York. The Mubarak trip was canceled. Then the FBI learned through its informant in the Blind Sheikh’s entourage that Abdel-Rahman had plans to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations headquarters, and the New York FBI offices. In late June the FBI had enough evidence to arrest the Blind Sheikh and did so after a public standoff with his supporters. The conspiracy was like none they had seen. Never mind how hard conspiracies are to prove––this one was worth it. They called it the Landmarks case.
Bin Laden’s name kept coming up. Over the summer, the CIA noted he was paying for members of the Blind Sheikh’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya to train in Sudan, and the State Department reported other links between bin Laden and the Blind Sheikh. By summer’s end, the United States had officially designated Sudan to be a “state sponsor of terrorism,” subject to a variety of sanctions, and put bin Laden on its TIPOFF watch list to prevent him from entering the United States.2
By the fall, the New York office of the FBI wanted to speak with Ali Mohamed. He had already been stopped by Canadian authorities in June for helping a man with false passports into the country, but the FBI’s San Francisco office had vouched for him. Now the New York office wanted to see him in connection with stolen documents from Ft. Bragg found in the apartment of the perpetrators of the World Trade Center bombing. Mohamed readily admitted his relationship to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which, he said, was interested in overthrowing the Saudi government. Yes, Mohamed informed them, he had provided military and intelligence training to them in Afghanistan and Sudan, but, no, he was not a criminal. The FBI let him go but began monitoring his phone calls.3
By now the White House wanted its own team to monitor terrorism-related events. In Washington, if an issue becomes really important, the White House steps in to “coordinate.” The World Trade Center bombing was important. The NSC staff person assigned to deal with terrorist attacks was Richard Clarke, then head of International Programs, a portfolio vague enough to include almost anything. Clarke thrived in both Democratic and Republican administrations. He had a reputation for getting things done and did so with a strategic focus and an autocratic hand, as I learned getting to know him from my vantage as one of State’s deputy assistant secretaries for African affairs.
“The notion that terrorism might occur in the United States was completely new to us then,” Clarke recalled. He asked his contacts in the FBI and the CIA about al-Kifah and its followers. “The FBI and CIA should have been able to answer my question, ‘Who are these guys?’ But they still could not.” As to any link to al-Qaeda, Clarke wrote: “Usama bin Laden had formed al-Qaeda three years earlier. Not only had no one in the CIA or FBI ever heard of it, apparently, they had never heard of bin Laden either. His name never came up in our meetings in 1993 as a suspect in the World Trade Center attack.”4 Instead, the FBI told the White House the bombing had been planned by one man, Ramzi Yousef.
On October 3, seven months after the World Trade Center bombing, eighteen American soldiers died in the battle of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The intention to help food distribution had morphed into an effort to do away with warlord Farah Aideed, whose men were getting in the way. In the United States, people watched helplessly as television networks showed the body of an American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after a Black Hawk helicopter had been shot down. Dick Clarke wondered who was behind the shooting. “I repeatedly pressed CIA to track down rumors in the foreign press about terrorists who might have trained Aideed’s militia. They discounted them.”5 In fact, the killers had been trained by Ali Mohamed, together with the al-Qaeda cohorts who participated in the battle.6
Osama bin Laden interpreted the U.S. reaction in Somalia as another victory and a sign of weakness. Quotes Michael Scheuer, “The youth [al-Qaeda fighters in Somalia] were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and [would] after a few blows run in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda . . . about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”7
Bin Laden then planned attacks against other U.S. targets. He tasked Ali Mohamed with setting up al-Qaeda fronts on the East African coast, including a fishing business, two charities, and a gemstone enterprise in Kenya. Then he gave Mohamed another assignment: “In late 1993, I was asked by bin Laden to conduct surveillance of American, British, French, and Israeli targets in Nairobi. Among the targets I did surveillance for was the American Embassy. . . . These targets were selected to retaliate against the United States for its involvement in Somalia. . . . I later went to Khartoum, where my surveillance files and photographs were reviewed by Osama bin Laden. . . . Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”8
The death of eighteen soldiers in Somalia gave bin Laden the confidence to start targeting Nairobi as a place to kill more Americans. In Washington the national security community was clueless. Dick Clarke noted that in 1993 the administration did not know that bin Laden or al-Qaeda existed.9 CIA director George Tenet remembered differently. “As early as 1993, [the CIA] had declared bin Laden to be a significant financier backer of Islamic terrorist movements. We knew he was funding paramilitary training of Arab religious militants in such far-flung places as Bosnia, Egypt, Kashmir, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen.”10 Billy Waugh, the CIA contractor in Khartoum, corroborated this: “In the early 1990s, though, it was impossible to read his intentions. He was an enemy, definitely, but he was not considered an imminent threat.”11 What was considered an imminent threat to the Clinton administration’s domestic image that year was the Somalia debacle. The U.S. intervention had, in fact, ended the famine, but the White House saw it as one more budget-cutting reason to avoid peacekeeping operations in general and peacekeeping in Africa specifically.
The effects of that policy directed how I spent many a day for the next few years. Richard and I were back in Washington, and I was again working for George Moose, this time as one of three deputy assistant secretaries (DAS) and seven office directors, most of them former ambassadors, with forty-six sub-Saharan countries in our policy portfolio. Among top priorities were Somalia’s humanitarian assistance; South Africa’s transition to democracy; Angola and Burundi, both on the verge of major ethnic conflicts; peace efforts to stop Rwanda’s war between Tutsis and Hutus; regional efforts to stop expanding chaos in Liberia; a civil war in Congo; terrorism from Sudan; and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
I was charged with “transnational issues,” meaning everything that crossed borders, including women, democracy, HIV/AIDS, peacekeeping, conflict resolution, humanitarian assistance, refugees, and the bureau’s management functions. When George Moose and my DAS colleagues divided other responsibilities, including the shared tasks of tending the bureaucratic machinery, I got oversight of Rwanda, Burundi, and Liberia.
Now that the Cold War was over, Americans wanted a peace dividend and a balanced budget, and the only way to make that happen was to shift the priorities. Africa was the loser. USAID began closing up shop all over the sub-Saharan continent to open new ones in the former Soviet republics. The CIA downsized in sub-Sahara as well. We were still promoting democracy, prosperity, and peace but with less money. When I was admonished by a very senior colleague that the Africa Bureau was not “forward-leaning” enough, I was astonished, in part because he could not define what that meant. I was in fact backward-leaning, clutching programs and peacekeeping operations to my bosom in countless interagency meetings focused on directing funds out of Africa. As our crises expanded and South Africa moved toward democratic elections, the bureau was thankfully left to fend for itself. We had a good boss, a decentralized decision-making structure, and experienced staff at many levels. Most important, AF had the reputation for taking care of its people. If Africa were at the bottom of the Clinton regional priority list, we would make the best of it.
As the United States divested from the sub-Sahara, al-Qaeda expanded there.
President Clinton proposed health care reform and a negotiated nuclear weapons deal with the Russians. News of a longtime Soviet spy in the CIA rocked the national security world, while the attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan rocked the sports world. In November the Republicans rocked everyone’s world by taking control of both the House and the Senate.
Dick Clarke was also busy. He organized a top-secret Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) to bring military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement assets under his direction. He also wrote a presidential directive to “deter, defeat, and respond to” potential terrorist attacks. The counterterrorism portfolio traditionally belonged to the State Department, but that was easily fixed. “Early in Clinton’s first term,” a colleague observed, “Clarke, characteristically, threw a bureaucratic elbow at the State Department by announcing that he would not attend their meetings; from now on, they would be attending his.”12
Only the most senior people in the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice—along with the CIA and the FBI—could attend the meetings, and they were not allowed to pass on information. Not that anyone but the CIA and FBI had a particular interest in counterterrorism. The Defense Department concerned itself with “preventive defense” now that the Cold War was over. The State Department had a sole counterterrorism coordinator with almost no resources or staff, and neither Secretaries Warren Christopher nor Madeleine Albright showed interest. Justice Department was equally unconcerned and under-resourced, so that left the FBI and the CIA to address the threats. They both had other distractions.
FBI director Louis Freeh complained in his memoir, “As director, I sometimes thought I was running a huge crisis-intervention unit, except that each new crisis seemed to add permanent responsibilities to the Bureau’s purview without necessarily expanding the resources to take them.”13 The CIA was still suffering from a lack of mission, the legacy of the Iran-Contra scandal, a brain drain from rank-and-file departures, and the discovery of a Soviet mole, Aldrich Ames, uncovered by none other than the FBI. Neither CIA director James Woolsey nor Freeh had a relationship with President Clinton, and the turf issues between the agencies meant their relationship was none too cooperative, either.
The two organizations nurtured enmities going back to J. Edgar Hoover; they loved secrets, and they hated to share information. The CIA relied on “protection of sources and methods,” and the FBI invoked “chain of evidence” and “grand jury secrecy.” To force the FBI to share information with the White House, Clarke came armed with a permission slip signed by both National Security Advisor Tony Lake and Attorney General Janet Reno. “Usually, the FBI acted like Lake-Reno was a resort in Nevada,” he later wrote.14
As the Counterterrorism Security Group suited up to confront Osama bin Laden, it was distracted by resource cuts and weakened by historic animosities, big egos, and turf battles. Osama bin Laden, meanwhile, thrived. As Peter Bergen remembered later, “During this time the youth from all Arabic countries began to come to Sudan—Libyans, Saudis, Emiratis. They gave [bin Laden] the title of ‘Sheikh Osama.’ Quickly he became very popular. They like him and they listen to him and especially [as] he has money. He can solve their problems.”15
Abdel-Rahman was in an American jail, but his Egyptian confederate, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the ever-helpful Ali Mohamed were on the move. They established a public relations office in London, expanded jihad training in Malaysia, and sent assets to Kenya. Al-Zawahiri connected with jihadists in Yemen and created an al-Qaeda base in the Balkans that included “humanitarian” organizations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo to direct arms and money to Bosnian Muslims.
Bin Laden also expanded his base, sending Wadih el-Hage to Nairobi to direct the cell Ali Mohamed had set up and to oversee the fronts Mohamed and others had created. Bin Laden sent a veteran of Somalia, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, to the Kenyan coast where he was assigned a fishing business to smuggle people, arms, forged documents, and fish. He married a local woman, settled in, and later helped make the bomb for the truck that blew us up.
Mohamed, meanwhile, continued to travel between his California home and Khartoum, sometimes for the meetings that the Government of Sudan hosted for international Islamist terrorist groups. During one of them, he introduced bin Laden to the head of Hezbollah, Iran’s go-to terrorist organization. Mohamed later said: “I was aware of certain contacts between al Qaeda and al Jihad organization, on one side, and Iran and Hezbollah on the other side. I arranged security for a meeting in the Sudan between [Imad] Mugniyeh, Hezbollah’s chief, and bin Laden. [Mugniyeh had masterminded the 1983 attack on the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. soldiers and led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops.] Hezbollah provided explosives training for al Qaeda.” Mohamed also pointed out that the objective was to force western countries out of the Middle East using tactics like the Marine Corps barracks bombing.16
For a while it looked as though Ali Mohamed’s days were numbered. The Landmarks trial—the conspiracy case against the Blind Sheikh and associates—included none other than Rabbi Kahane’s assailant. Once considered a lone gunman, he was now a co-defendant. His lawyers argued that his activities at al-Kifah were part of a U.S.-sponsored covert operation to train and arm people for the Afghan war. The Boston Herald publicized an internal CIA report concluding that the agency was “partially culpable” for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing because it helped train and support some of the bombers.
It was determined that a significant amount of blowback appeared to have occurred. A U.S. intelligence source claims the CIA gave at least $1 billion to forces in Afghanistan connected to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. More than a half-dozen of the WTC bombers belonged to this faction, and some of the CIA money paid for their training. The source says, “By giving these people the funding that we did, a situation was created in which it could be safely argued that we bombed the World Trade Center.” Those connected to the bombing who went to Afghanistan include Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, aka the Blind Sheikh, and others.”17
At the trial, lawyers for the defense provided evidence of the documents Ali Mohamed stole from Ft. Bragg and the training he provided al-Kifah. The defense wanted to call Mohamed as a witness but could not locate him. The FBI could. They were monitoring his telephone and discovered Mohamed at Wadih el-Hage’s house in Nairobi. They told him they wanted to talk. Mohamed later testified, “I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FBI, but didn’t disclose everything that I knew.” The FBI already knew that he worked for bin Laden and that bin Laden had been paying for the Blind Sheikh’s living expenses.18 They knew Mohamed often talked with Wadih el-Hage because they were tapping his phone in California and el-Hage’s phone in Nairobi. They may have known a lot more, but they let him go nevertheless. Ali Mohamed was never called to testify by the federal prosecutor in the Landmarks trial, and the defense attorneys never found him. His name was on the list of unindicted co-conspirators, along with bin Laden’s, but that was it.19
Luck initially held as well for bin Laden, still in Khartoum. Assassins had tried to kill him and his son in a shootout after morning prayers early in 1994 but were unsuccessful. Bin Laden sent for Ali Mohamed to train a new crew of bodyguards, all of them Egyptian. Then family problems began for bin Laden. He later recounted, “They sent me my mother, my uncle, and my brothers in almost nine visits to Khartoum asking me to stop and return to Arabia to apologize to [Saudi] King Fahd. . . . I refused to go back.”20 Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship and froze his assets, and without his allowance, bin Laden began to lose money. One of his wives divorced him, taking three children with her. His work life may have been fine, but his personal life was not.
Islamist terrorist attacks around the world stepped up: Hezbollah blew up a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires; the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian organization, hijacked an Air France jet; the Blind Sheikh’s followers attacked tourists in Egypt a dozen times over the year; and suicide bombers opposed to the Arab-Israeli peace process stepped up the scale and frequency of their attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. By the end of 1994, the State Department had enough evidence to note in its annual report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, that “transnational terrorists with access to modern communications and substantial funding who had trained in militant camps in Afghanistan were now on the scene.” The CIA also published a National Intelligence Estimate about extremists angry at the United States in possession of weapons, money, assorted benefactors, and international networks.21 Nonetheless, Dick Clarke and the Counterterrorism Security Group at the NSC remained in the dark. Clarke wrote, “Although bin Laden’s name surfaced with increasing frequency in raw intelligence in 1993 and 1994, CIA analyses continued to refer to him as a radicalized rich kid, who was playing at terrorism by sending checks to terrorist groups.”22
While parts of the national security community were learning about Islamists, I was learning about the policy-making process of the national security community. It was rough, tough, and nasty. War metaphors peppered our vocabulary. We would “gird our loins” going into meetings and return either “winning the battle” or “ready to fight another day.” “Allies” were fine; “collaborators” were unheard of. The “enemy” was often another agency, and “spies” were the people who attended meetings not to contribute but to report back to persons unknown. State Department people considered the CIA full of “cowboys,” and we were “weenies” to them. The one thing that the civilian side could agree upon was that the Defense Department was “eating our lunch.”
The terrorists I encountered in the course of my work on the African continent were ethnic ideologues, not religious ones. Warlords in Liberia talked to me about cannibalism—the other guy did it—and one in particular, Charles Taylor, kicked me out of his office when I told him to stop calling me “my dear.” Genocide perpetrators in Rwanda tried to tell me their “civil uprisings” were “spontaneous.” Militaries and militias in Burundi spoke of “kill or be killed.” A variety of thugs in and out of uniform in other places reminded me that my place as a woman was secondary and ordained by God. Almost all of them were put out by a woman, a white one at that, looking straight into their faces and telling them to stop the killing. I did so with pleasure on behalf of the U.S. government and women everywhere.
On trips to the region, I saw creative strategies to address conflict unheard of in Washington. In Burundi, the UN’s senior representative called for meetings between combatants at odd and various times of day or night because “when they are talking with me they are not killing each other.” The U.S. embassy used local radio to discourage violence. I visited with a colleague at a particularly tense time and followed the country team’s advice to counsel peace on the local radio. That night ended without a killing. The next morning, a woman approached me on the street. “Was that you on the radio? Thank you. We passed a night in peace.” A few months later we supported a “peace radio station” to bring the communities together.
In Liberia an older woman described to me how she and her friends brought desperately needed food into Monrovia past hostile militia blockades. On the way out of town, they packed their suitcases with dirty underwear ready for the inevitable baggage checks and thefts. As the boy soldiers rifled through their suitcases, dropping the clothes in disgust, the women were taking them to task. “Don’t point that gun at me!” “Why aren’t you in school?” “Where’s your mother?” “What is your family’s name?” They returned with the same bags filled with food, to be hastily waved through each checkpoint. A decade later the women of Liberia themselves brought peace to the country through a strategy of nonviolence described in the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell. I used the film in leadership seminars for college students to show what the practice of leadership looks like. The women of Liberia also elected the first female president in sub-Saharan Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.
In Washington, by contrast, conflict resolution strategies invariably turned to military means. In our case we were greeted with significant pushback from our Defense Department colleagues explaining why something could/should/would not work in Africa. Creative strategies were never considered. My phone calls to the perpetrators were ridiculed. Meanwhile, the Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House had missed the fact that we were engaged in an entirely new type of conflict and that al-Qaeda had the upper hand.
The Republican majority in Congress promised smaller government, lower taxes, and pro-business policies. It lost no time cutting federal funds and snarling over the next year’s budgets. In November the government closed for five days, and again for twenty-one days in late December and early January. The continuing O. J. Simpson trial, Christopher Reeve/Superman’s paralysis after falling off a horse, the Million Man March, and the Unabomber’s manifesto kept the media and public engaged.
For the small Washington counterterrorism group, the year began on a good note with the discovery of Ramzi Yousef in Manila. The architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was making a bomb in his apartment when he started a fire. The police investigated and took into custody his associates and his laptop computer. On it was this: “All people who support the U.S. government are our targets in our future plans and that is because all those people are responsible for their government’s actions and they support the U.S. foreign policy and are satisfied with it. We will hit all U.S. nuclear targets. If the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel, then we will continue to carry out operations inside and outside the United States to include—”23 The document came to a halt in midsentence.
Investigators also found plans to detonate bombs on eleven U.S. flights and indications that Yousef had already caused one explosion that killed a man on Philippines Airline Flight 434 in late 1994. As they dug deeper, they uncovered evidence that Yousef and his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), planned to assassinate the pope and ram a dozen hijacked aircraft into key American landmarks, including the CIA. The files included names and photos of associates and trails of money transfers.
The plot was named “Bojinka,” and copies of the computer files were handed over to the CIA. The CIA, in turn, gave other copies to the FBI, which found multiple program deletions. The FBI accused the CIA of destroying evidence.24 Meanwhile, Ramzi Yousef and KSM had fled the Philippines. Their associates were released.
In February Yousef was betrayed to U.S. authorities for reward money and picked up at a building owned by bin Laden in Islamabad, Pakistan. On the way to the United States, Yousef talked about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, about his colleagues, and about bin Laden. The FBI listened. When they tracked the money, the phone calls, and the plane tickets that supported Yousef’s bombing exploits, they found Osama bin Laden at the other end.
In March members of a religious cult unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing thirteen and injuring many more. Dick Clarke made sure the new presidential decision directive on terrorism he was drafting addressed the possibility of finding chemical, biological, or nuclear materials in terrorist hands.
On April 19 a truck bomb ripped apart the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. One hundred sixty-eight people lost their lives; hundreds more were injured. Was this the act of Middle East terrorists? People buzzed about it, but in short order two Americans were charged, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. It just so happened that Nichols had visited Cebu, a small island in the Philippines where his wife lived, at the same time Ramzi Yousef was there. Clarke wondered about the connection. “Could the al-Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. Government? . . . We do know that Nichols’s bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned.”25
Terrorist attacks continued. In June assassins associated with both the Blind Sheikh and Ayman al-Zawahiri barely missed killing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak during a visit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Sudan’s help was clear.26 Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United States persuaded the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on Sudan. Perhaps to show he had gotten the message, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir asked Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, KSM, living in Khartoum, to leave the country and then tipped the U.S. authorities that he had gone to Qatar.27 The CIA planned the operation to pick him up, but, according to one account, “When the FBI was briefed, the [overseas FBI office] based in Rome moved in and tried to take over the operation without concern for CIA equities on the ground or Qatari political tendencies.”28 KSM got away.
In the fall, the Algerian Armed Islamic Group attacked the Paris Metro, and in November radicals bombed the Saudi National Guard headquarters in Riyadh, killing five American soldiers and two Indian soldiers. Before the FBI could speak to the perpetrators, Saudi authorities had rounded them up. They confessed their guilt on national television and lost their heads, literally, within days. At least one of them noted Osama bin Laden’s influence. Six days later, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group drove two cars filled with explosives through the gates of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, killing sixteen people.
Dick Clarke responded systematically. He wrote an executive order making it a felony to give money to terrorist organizations or fronts; he penned a presidential order directing more integrated efforts to counter money laundering. He requested more funding and new legislation and, although it took a year, got both.29 He also responded tactically. After the failed attempt to assassinate President Mubarak in Ethiopia, Clarke asked the Defense Department to propose a plan to retaliate against Sudan. Clarke described this exchange in the office of the national security advisor, Tony Lake.
While the Joint Staff dutifully briefed on the plan, they recommended strongly against it. “I can see why,” Lake replied after seeing the details. “This isn’t stealth. There is nothing quiet or covert about this. It’s going to war with Sudan.”
The military briefing leader nodded. “That’s what we do, sir. If you want covert, there’s the CIA.”30
In June President Clinton signed off on a CIA proposal to abduct Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad militants from their various hiding places and send them to Egypt for interrogation and likely torture. “It was begun in desperation,” wrote Michael Scheuer, one of the authors. “We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn’t capture them because we had nowhere to take them, due to legal and diplomatic complications. . . . We had to come up with a third party.”31
In December U.S. authorities arrested Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, for funding exactly the kind of terrorist group the administration had in mind when it issued its executive order. His name was in Ramzi Yousef’s computer, and when he was arrested, his luggage contained explosives, weapons, and books advocating assassination. He was released to the government of Jordan, however, after Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Attorney General Janet Reno approved his deportation per Jordan’s request. Once in Jordan, Khalifa was released. He found his way back to Saudi Arabia as a hero and went on to create another al-Qaeda cell. A CIA analyst later reported, “I remember people at the CIA who were ripshit at the time. Not even speaking in retrospect, but contemporaneous with what the intelligence community knew about bin Laden, Khalifa’s deportation was unreal.”32 Ali Mohamed also avoided authorities, although the FBI continued to tap his phone.
By the end of 1995, it was clear from worldwide terrorist activities that the counterterrorism community needed to get its act together. The CIA detailed a small staff of analysts from the Counterterrorism Center to a virtual station named Alec Station, dedicated exclusively to tracking bin Laden and al-Qaeda. “If you were an up-and-coming CIA officer,” commented a former case officer, “you didn’t want to get sent down there to sit around with those FBI guys.”33 The FBI, in turn, formed what it called the I-49 Squad. Staffed with people who had worked with the New York JTTF, it was charged with overseeing Middle East terrorist cases in general and developing evidence for a secret grand jury investigation against bin Laden specifically. To ensure cooperation between the two units, FBI agents from the I-49 Squad were sent to Alec Station.
Alas, the three organizations with capabilities to intercept information—the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA—each had their own wall of secrecy, and no agency would fully share data with the others. The FBI could not even share with colleagues in the Justice Department because of “the wall.” Aptly named, the new regulation prevented FBI agents who had access to intelligence about terrorist cells from passing on the information to the lawyers prosecuting cases against them—unless someone at headquarters approved. It was a bureaucratic power move, and complaints began immediately. At the tenth public hearing of the 9/11 Commission on April 23, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that “the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents.” It was the reason that U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and her assistant, Patrick Fitzgerald, apologetically explained to Richard and me in 2001 why they had not shared information about al-Qaeda’s activities in Nairobi before we were attacked. At the time, we had no idea what they were talking about.
In the State Department, the wall against which I was banging my head was called resources. I was part of an ad hoc group of career people serving as a sounding board to State’s chief financial officer. We were way beyond the charade of “doing more with less” and deep into conversations about fixing the plumbing in the department vs. hiring more Foreign Service members to meet ongoing need. We could not do both. Not once did we consider how to challenge the senior “leaders” to secure more funding. It was understood they would not do anything. That was just the way it was.