Breakdown

How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11

Bill Gertz

• Editorial: Regnery
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781596987104
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Intelligence & Espionage

New York Times bestselling author Bill Gertz uses his unparalleled access to America's intelligence system to show how this system completely broke down in the years, months, and days leading up to the deadly terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

1

THE OSAMA FILE

OSAMA BIN LADEN SAT IN his private office on a farm twenty miles from Khartoum, Sudan. It was November 12,1995. The thin Saudi millionaire listened intently to the radio near his desk for world news reports. He was preoccupied, nervous, intense. The next day, a senior official of the Sudanese security service paid a visit to the Saudi terrorist leader. Bin Laden appeared tired. At 11:00 A.M. bin Laden and the official left the office, and bin Laden’s mood had changed. He was now happy and relaxed. Around noon, on November 13, a telephone call reached the farm. The caller asked to speak to bin Laden and was told he was asleep. The caller insisted he be waked. After taking the call, bin Laden expressed pleasure at the good news. He asked for God’s blessing on the caller and remarked: “This is not the first nor the last. The rains starts with one drop, and it soon becomes a downpour. Things will be ready.”

Thirty-five minutes later a van exploded outside a three-story building housing the Office of the Program Manager, Saudi Arabia National Guard, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The U.S. Army used the building as its headquarters for training Saudi military personnel. The van had been packed with some 250 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive. The blast ripped through the building, causing heavy damage and killing seven people, including five Americans. Thirty-five others were injured. The explosion would shake not only the oil-rich kingdom—which, until then, had been immune to terrorism—but also the entire world. It was bin Laden’s first deadly attack.

“I think this is just the beginning of a very serious opposition movement to the Saudi royal family,” Vincent Cannistraro, the former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, said at the time. “This is not an isolated incident.”

President Bill Clinton responded to the attack by saying, “We owe it to them [those killed in the attack] and to all of our citizens to increase our efforts to deter terrorism, to make sure that those responsible for this hideous act are brought to justice, to intensify and pressure the isolation of countries that support terrorism—and we must spare no effort to make sure our own law enforcement officers have what they need to protect our citizens.”

After nearly half a century of U.S.-Saudi military cooperation, this was the first terrorist attack on a U.S. military base in the kingdom. It happened on Clinton’s watch, and it was the beginning of a string of terrorist attacks by bin Laden and related terrorist groups that left the Clinton administration confused and unable to respond.

Within months, bin Laden struck again. The Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran housed hundreds of U.S. airmen who took part in flight operations against Iraq. Just before 10:00 P.M. on the night of June 25, 1996, three guards posted on the roof of building 131 at Khobar Towers spotted two men parking a large fuel truck at the edge of a parking lot, eighty feet from the base of the building. The driver and his passenger jumped into a waiting car and sped away.

One of the sentries immediately radioed a warning to the U.S. Air Force’s Central Security Control. The guards shouted for people to evacuate the building. In four minutes they were able to alert the top three floors before there was an explosion so loud it could be heard in the neighboring country of Bahrain, twenty miles away. The blast killed nineteen Americans, and hundreds of other American and Saudi military personnel were injured. The bomb inside the truck was estimated by the Pentagon to have been the equivalent of twenty thousand pounds of TNT. It left an eighty-foot crater.

Again, bin Laden was ecstatic about the attack, according to intelligence sources. Bin Laden ordered an assistant to telephone Mohammed al-Masari, a Saudi dissident based in London, who ran the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights. “You remember when the first ‘accident’ occurred. Now the second has occurred. More is coming.” Bin Laden then told Masari, “Let them keep our friend Safar al-Hawali in prison as he will hear good news very soon. We are working on getting him out.”

Their friend Safar al-Hawali, a Saudi cleric, had been arrested and jailed by the Saudi government in 1994 for antigovernment activities. He is considered a spiritual godfather to bin Laden and his cohorts. Hawaii is part of the extremist Salafi branch of the already extreme sect of Wahhabi Islam. Hawali would be released, and by October 2001, he had become a university lecturer living in Islam’s holy city of Mecca and a public critic of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism.

But that was for the future. On the day of the Dhahran bombing, bin Laden received another telephone call. This call was from one of his closest associates in terror, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who asked about the bombing. Al-Zawahiri offered his congratulations to bin Laden for the successful attack. Then another phone call from bin Laden’s terrorist network came in. This time it was from a member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ashra al-Hadi.

On June 29, four days after the Khobar Towers bombing, bin Laden left Port Sudan on the Red Sea aboard an unmarked jet that was operated by a Sudanese aircrew. He arrived at Khartoum International Airport and was greeted by Nafi Ali Nafi, an official of the ruling Sudanese National Islamic Front. The greeting was clearly a sign that National Islamic Front leader Hassan Turabi knew that bin Laden was in the country. The aircraft, identified as a G-8, was parked on the military side of the airport. Bin Laden’s entourage included several armed bodyguards. There were three Toyota Land Cruisers waiting for them. The vehicles departed the airport and turned west, away from Khartoum to bin Laden’s special farm located near Soba, about twenty miles southeast of Khartoum. The compound includes a mosque, a corral for horses and cows, space for administrative officers, and a warehouse.

The information on bin Laden’s connection to the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia was obtained by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. The center had been set up in the mid-1980s following several high-profile terrorists attacks. The center’s stated objective was to “preempt, disrupt, and defeat terrorists.” In reality, the center was created because the CIA had failed to deal effectively with terrorism. As one official put it: “You set up ‘centers’ when other parts of agencies fail.”

By July 1996, the CIA had no one close to bin Laden, even though bin Laden had formed al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” in 1989, dedicating the group to attacking the United States, its friends, and its interests around the world. The only information the CIA had came from a foreign intelligence service that had been able to penetrate the al Qaeda organization.

“We have no unilateral sources close to bin Laden, nor any reliable way of intercepting his communications,” CIA analysts stated in a report on July 1, 1996, that is labeled “TOP SECRET UMBRA.” “We must rely on foreign intelligence services to confirm his movements and activities. We have no sources who have supplied reporting on Saudi opposition cells inside Saudi Arabia, and little information about those cells’ location, size, composition, or activities.”

dp n="22" folio="11" ?

The statement was a startling admission that U.S. intelligence agencies, despite spending more than $30 billion annually, were totally helpless in tracking down the world’s most ruthless terrorist leader and his organization.

The CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies had adopted the high-technology approach to gathering information; but these agencies significantly lacked “human intelligence” from people in a position to know the plans and activities of al Qaeda.

By 1996, when bin Laden began launching spectacular and deadly attacks, the U.S. intelligence community was effectively blind, deaf, and dumb. Even the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, which would later be linked to bin Laden, did not prompt a major intelligence effort to find out what was going on among Islamic terrorist groups.

It is important to look at what U.S. intelligence agencies knew about bin Laden in the mid-1990s, when the first attacks were carried out in Riyadh and Dhahran. In 1996, as the CIA report shows, the CIA had no one even close to bin Laden, and it would be years before the National Security Agency could zero in on his Inmarsat satellite communications. Still, the foreign intelligence service had provided valuable information to the CIA. But the CIA viewed the information as unverified. “Based on a preliminary assessment of the ... reporting, we can neither confirm nor deny most of the... reports,” the CIA stated, adding that most of the reporting “fits well” with what is known about bin Laden’s operations in the Persian Gulf.¹

What the CIA did know was that bin Laden was working hard to build up a network of Islamic extremists of many nationalities and was “using his longtime relationship with Iraqi and Sudanese officials,” the report said. In December 1995, bin Laden told his supporters not to worry about an arms cache that was found by Kuwaiti Interior Ministry officials in Al Wafrah. “There are others,” he told his supporters. The weapons had been stolen from Kuwaiti military stockpiles during the Iraqi occupation. Some of the stolen weapons were later sold in Bosnia by a Kuwaiti businessman. The connection to Iraqi-occupied Kuwait pointed to support for the group from Saddam Hussein. But the CIA would play down these connections to Iraq after September 11, 2001, when the agency insisted it could not confirm links to Baghdad.

But the 1996 CIA report stated plainly: “In August [1995] bin Laden held a meeting at his farm near Khartoum with a probable Iraqi intelligence service official from the Iraqi Embassy in Khartoum, a Sudanese Army officer, an Egyptian extremist, a Palestinian believed to be an explosives expert with experience in car bombs and a man with a Bahraini passport whose family is from the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.”

There is, moreover, evidence Iran is linked to bin Laden. A CIA report in 1996 stated that bin Laden set up a meeting with Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) officials at his residence in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The meeting showed that the Iranians were considering a relationship with him even though bin Laden’s brand of Sunni Muslim extremism differs from Tehran’s radical Shiism.

Bin Laden had also traveled to Qatar, on the Persian Gulf, in January 1995 and discussed plans to attack targets in eastern Saudi Arabia during the Muslim rite of Haj. He had shipped twenty tons of the plastic explosive C-4 from Poland. Two tons of it were sent to Saudi Arabia, the rest to Qatar. In addition, he was known to be giving money to Egyptian Islamic Jihad for terrorism against the Egyptian government and would later be linked to attacks on tourists in Egypt.

Beginning in January 1996, the CIA set up a special “station” within the Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters, devoted solely to bin Laden. The station was allowed to operate as though it were a CIA field office and was set up because of the growing volume of intelligence reports indicating bin Laden was more than a paymaster of terror—that in fact he had set up worldwide terrorist operations with clandestine cells and linkages to foreign governments.

According to CIA officials, almost all of the analysts who worked at the bin Laden station had never served abroad and did not speak Arabic. Some were Directorate of Operations officers with foreign experience, but most were not. Deskbound and language handicapped as they were, the evidence was unmistakable that bin Laden was a major supporter of terrorism. An intelligence official told me information coming in often pointed to bin Laden. At the time, however, the CIA still wrongly assumed that bin Laden was primarily a financier of terrorism rather than a major organizer.

Nevertheless, the links between bin Laden and terrorism proved so serious that in 1998 President Clinton issued a secret executive order known as a “finding” that authorized covert action operations against bin Laden. Unfortunately, the CIA’s efforts to track, find, and stop bin Laden—either through military action or arrest and prosecution—were a dismal failure. The problem was that the CIA remained largely ignorant about bin Laden’s operations outside of tracing his financial support for terrorism.

In his first interview after leaving the Oval Office, Clinton told Newsweek that he had really wanted to get bin Laden. He said he had vacillated in bombing bin Laden when he had the opportunity because of concerns about civilian casualties. “We knew more or less where [bin Laden] would spend the night,” Clinton said. “But keep in mind, we were told he was going to be at that training site [in August 1998] and he left a couple of hours before [the missiles hit]. So what did I have? A 40 percent chance of knowing we could have hit it. But there were a very large number of women and children in that compound and it’s almost like he was daring me to kill them. And we know at the same time he was training people to kill me. Which was fair enough—I was trying to get him. I felt it would hurt America’s interests if we killed a lot of Afghani women and children and didn’t even get him.”

The other option Clinton tried was sending special operations commandos to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan. “But the closest we could get was about nine hundred miles away on a boat, since we didn’t have any basing rights then, and we didn’t have anything like the international support that existed after September 11 for overthrowing the Taliban,” Clinton said.

What was really lacking was the intelligence and covert operations capability America needed to defend itself and its interests. Spending on efforts to stop terrorism skyrocketed in the 1990s, but it failed to build an intelligence community that could stop bin Laden. Beginning in 1995, $6.7 billion was added to government agencies for counterterrorism. By 2001, federal spending on counterterrorism was $19.5 billion. After September 11, the budget nearly doubled to $37.7 billion. But throwing money into counterterrorism without providing vigorous leadership, policy, and direction will achieve nothing.

In the past, this money was usually spent on new computer systems, analysts, hardware, and, in the FBI, on Chevy Suburbans. What it did not do was prevent the September 11 terrorist attack. Nor, on a lower level, did intelligence operations improve in the years leading up to the attack.

In December 1997, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)—one of the “Big Five” intelligence agencies that include the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Security Agency (NSA)—reported that the evidence of bin Laden’s involvement in Middle Eastern terrorist bombings was inconclusive. “His followers may have been involved in at least one of the attacks in Saudi Arabia, although the information available also points in other directions.” On the question of whether the bombings were an intelligence failure, the report said: “We were tracking this broader trend and warning that threat levels were increasing, but we were not able to predict the timing and magnitude of specific attacks.” Like the CIA, the INR adopted the posture of infallibility on intelligence matters.

“Given that [terrorist] surveillance and activities designed to test our defenses continue, and militants such as Osama bin Laden continue to call for the expulsion of U.S. troops, more attacks in the region are likely,” INR stated. The terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia were not capable of fomenting widespread activism or internal disorder, the INR concluded, “nor do they appear able to disrupt the economy or the flow of oil.”

In early May 1997, the NSA picked up an important intelligence intercept. A top secret report by NSA’s W Group was sent to senior Clinton administration officials on May 7,1997. It stated that authorities in “an unspecified country” had arrested a senior official of bin Laden’s organization. He was the head of the financial committee of bin Laden’s “Islamic Army.” “The committee manages the Islamic Army’s finances and audits members of the Islamic Army,” the report stated. The al Qaeda paymaster would prove to be a valuable intelligence source.

Bin Laden, however, soon struck again. On August 7, 1998, at approximately 10:30 A.M. local time, truck bombs exploded in front of American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The bombings killed 220 people and wounded more than four thousand others. Twelve American government employees and family members, and thirty-two Kenyan and eight Tanzanian nationals employed by the government were among the dead. “The bombings were carried out by members and associates of Osama bin Laden’s organization, known by the Arabic word ‘al-Qaeda’,” the FBI stated in an internal summary of the attack.

dp n="27" folio="16" ?

A State Department report released in January 1999 on the bombings found that there was “no credible intelligence” in advance of the attack that would have provided immediate or tactical warning of the blasts. “A number of earlier intelligence reports cited alleged threats against several U.S. diplomatic and other targets, including the embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam,” the report by a panel of experts led by retired admiral William Crowe states. The report concluded:

All of these reports were disseminated to the intelligence community and to appropriate posts abroad, but were largely discounted because of doubts about the sources. Other reporting—while taken seriously—was imprecise, changing and non-specific as to dates, diminishing its usefulness. Additionally, actions taken by intelligence and law enforcement authorities to confront suspect terrorist groups, including the Al-Haramayn nongovernmental organization and the Osama Bin Laden (UBL) organization in Nairobi, were believed to have dissipated the alleged threats. Indeed, for eight months prior to the August 7 bombings, no further intelligence was produced to warn the embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam.

It was more no-fault intelligence. The FBI was let off the hook by the State Department panel for the failure to stop the bombing. It said that the FBI “uncovered no information indicating that the earlier intelligence reporting could have predicted the time or place of the attacks.” The panel report revealed that the State Department did not have a representative at what was supposed to be an interagency Counterterrorism Center, a center that since 1997 had known about terrorists operating in Kenya. “The FBI and the Department of State should consult on ways to improve information sharing on international terrorism to ensure that all relevant information that might have some bearing on threats against or security for U.S. missions or personnel abroad is made available,” the report said.

The FBI had in hand at least two intelligence warnings in 1997 about terrorist attacks in Africa. One was based on an FBI intelligence breakthrough in August 1997—a year before the embassy bombings. Working with local authorities in Nairobi, FBI agents raided the home of Wadih el-Hage, a Lebanese-born Islamic militant who was a U.S. citizen. On a computer found in the residence, the FBI discovered a letter from an Islamic militant named Haroun Fazul, who was part of a clandestine “cell” of al Qaeda terrorists operating in East Africa who were in the process of planning the bombings that would be carried out a year later.

Fazul had written to “Brother Sharif,” another terrorist who was part of the East Africa cell, to warn that the security of their operation had been endangered by the arrest of the al Qaeda paymaster. “We can now state that the security position on the cell is at 100 percent danger,” Fazul wrote. He spoke of communicating by the Inte...

Índice

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 - THE OSAMA FILE
• 2 - THE LOUD BANG NO ONE HEARD
• 3 - THE DIA: DEATH BY BUREAUCRACY
• 4 - THE PCIA-POLITICALLY CORRECT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
• 5 - THE FBI: THE DECLINE OF DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE
• 6 - CONGRESS AND DESTRUCTIVE OVERSIGHT
• 7 - TECHNICAL SPYING
• 8 - NONSECURITY
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A - THE TRACE
• APPENDIX B - THE EVIDENCE
• NOTES
• Acknowledgments
• INDEX
• Copyright Page