CIA Surveillance Intensifies
Back at Langley, the bin Laden unit, using classified channels, regularly transmitted reports to policymakers about threats bin Laden issued against American targets via faxed leaflets, television interviews and underground pamphlets. The CIA’s analysts described bin Laden at the time as an active, dangerous financier of Islamic extremism, but they considered him more a money source than a terrorist operator.
To senior career officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, the TRODPINT tribal team now beckoned as a way to watch bin Laden in Afghanistan. The paid Afghan agents could monitor or harass the Saudi up close under CIA control — and perhaps capture him for trial if the White House approved such an operation. Operators and analysts in the bin Laden unit argued passionately for more active measures against him. Jeff O’Connell, then-director of the Counterterrorist Center, and his deputy, Paul Pillar, agreed in the summer of 1997 to hand them control of the TRODPINT agent team, complete with its weapons and spy gear.
As bin Laden’s bloodcurdling televised threats against Americans increased in number and menace during 1997, the CIA — with the approval of the Clinton White House — turned from just watching bin Laden toward making plans to capture him.
Working with lawyers at Langley in late 1997 and early 1998, the TRODPINT agents’ CIA controllers modified the original Kasi capture plan, with its secret airstrip for extraction flights, so it could be used to seize bin Laden and prosecute him, or kill him if he violently resisted arrest.
A long and frustrating hunt for bin Laden had formally begun.
During the three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the hunt would eventually involve several dozen local paid CIA agents in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a secret commando team drawn from Uzbek special forces, another drawn from retired Pakistani special forces, and a deepening intelligence alliance with the legendary Tajik guerrilla leader from Afghanistan’s north, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a man with a long and mutually frustrating history with the CIA. But despite these varied efforts, bin Laden continually eluded their grasp.
Years later, those involved in the secret campaign against bin Laden still disagree about why it failed — and who is to blame.
On the front lines in Pakistan and Central Asia, working-level CIA officers felt they had a rare, urgent sense of the menace bin Laden posed before Sept. 11. Yet a number of controversial proposals to attack bin Laden were turned down by superiors at Langley or the White House, who feared that the plans were poorly developed, wouldn’t work or would embroil the United States in Afghanistan’s then-obscure civil war. At other times, plans to track or attack bin Laden were delayed or watered down after stalemated debates inside Clinton’s national security team.
At Langley, CIA officers sometimes saw the Clinton Cabinet as overly cautious, obsessed with legalities, and unwilling to take political risks in Afghanistan by arming bin Laden’s Afghan enemies and directly confronting the radical Taliban Islamic militia. But at the Clinton White House, senior policymakers and counterterrorism analysts sometimes saw the CIA’s efforts in Afghanistan as timid, naive, self-protecting and ineffective.
Some of the agency’s efforts involved collecting intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts; others grew into covert actions designed to capture or kill leaders of his al- Qaeda network. Both tracks were carried out in deep secrecy mainly by career clandestine service officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center and the Near East Division of the agency’s Directorate of Operations.
A Plan to Grab Bin Laden
As the TRODPINT team began its work on bin Laden early in 1998, a federal grand jury in New York opened a secret investigation into the Saudi’s terrorist-financing activity. The probe had been prompted by a defector from bin Laden’s inner circle, financial evidence from terrorist attacks in Egypt and elsewhere, and old files from earlier terrorist cases in New York. No one outside the Justice Department was supposed to know about the grand jury’s work, but it began to leak to officials involved with the CIA’s planning.
CIA officers working from Islamabad, led by station chief Gary Schroen, assumed in early 1998 that if their agents captured bin Laden in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. grand jury would quickly indict him. If not, the CIA or the Clinton White House would ask Egypt or Saudi Arabia to take custody of bin Laden for trial. Schroen kept asking the Counterterrorist Center at Langley, “Do we have an indictment?” The answers, according to several officials involved, were cryptic: Bin Laden was “indictable,” the Islamabad station was told.
The TRODPINT team developed a detailed plan to hold bin Laden in a cave in southern Afghanistan for 30 days before U.S. Special Forces flew in secretly to take him away. The agents located a cave where they could hide out comfortably. They assured their CIA handlers that they had stored enough food and water there to keep bin Laden healthy.
By imprisoning bin Laden in the cave, the agents hoped to ease his extraction. If enough time passed after his capture, al-Qaeda’s agitated lieutenants would be less alert when the Americans flew in to bundle him off. Also, the detention would allow time to persuade a U.S. attorney or a foreign government to hand down criminal charges.
If CIA officers and their paid agents detained bin Laden for an eventual trial in the United States, they would be operating under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which allowed the CIA to aid the pursuit of international fugitives. The measure was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and renewed by successive presidents. A thick archive of Justice Department memorandums and court opinions upheld the right of American agents to abduct fugitives overseas and return them to U.S. courts in many instances.
At the same time, Executive Order 12333 banned assassination by the CIA or its agents. CIA officers met with their TRODPINT agents in Pakistan to emphasize that their plan to capture bin Laden and hold him in the Afghan cave could not turn into an assassination. “I want to reinforce this with you,” one officer told the Afghans in a meeting later described in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”
As they refined their kidnapping plans in the spring of 1998, the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center looked with rising interest at Tarnak Farm. This was a compound of perhaps 100 acres that lay isolated on a stretch of desert about three miles from the Kandahar airport. On some nights, bin Laden slept at Tarnak with one of his wives. He chatted on his satellite phone and lived fairly openly, protected by bodyguards. The question arose: Could the CIA’s tribal agents be equipped to raid bin Laden’s home and take him from his bed?
Tarnak’s main compound was encircled by a mud-brick wall about 10 feet high. Inside were about 80 modest one-story and two-story structures. Flat plains of sand and sagebrush extended for miles. Kandahar’s crowded bazaars were a half-hour drive away.
CIA officers based in Islamabad spent long hours with the TRODPINT team’s leaders to devise a plan to attack Tarnak in the middle of the night. The Afghans had scouted and mapped Tarnak up close; the CIA had photographed it from satellites.
The agents organized an attack party of about 30 fighters. They identified a staging point where they would assemble their vehicles. They would drive to a secondary rallying point a few miles from Tarnak.
About 2 a.m., the main raiding party would walk across the desert. They had scouted a path that avoided minefields and had deep gullies to mask their approach. They would breach the outer wall by crawling through a drainage ditch on the airport side.
A second group planned to roll quietly toward the front gate in two vehicles. They would carry silenced pistols to take out two guards at the entrance. Meanwhile, the other attackers would have burst into the several small huts where bin Laden’s wives slept. When they found the tall, bearded Saudi, they would cuff him, drag him toward the gate and load him into a Land Cruiser. Other vehicles back at the rally point would approach in sequence, and together they would go to the provisioned cave about 30 miles away.
Satellite photography and reports from the ground indicated that there were dozens of women and children living at Tarnak. Langley asked members of the tribal team to explain in detail how they planned to minimize harm to bystanders during their assault.
The CIA officers involved thought their agents were serious, semiprofessional fighters who were trying to cooperate as best they could. Yet “if you understood the Afghan mind-set and the context,” recalled an officer involved, it was clear that in any raid the Afghans would probably fire indiscriminately at some point.
In Washington, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism coordinator, drove out to Langley to meet with his CIA counterpart, O’Connell, who briefed him on the details of the Tarnak attack plan and how much it would cost. O’Connell also outlined the political risks, including the potential problem of civilian casualties.
Members of the White House counterterrorism team reacted skeptically. Their sense was that the TRODPINT agents were old anti-Soviet mujaheddin who had long since passed their peak fighting years and were probably milking the CIA for money while minimizing the risks they took on the ground. If they did go through with a Tarnak raid, women and children would die and bin Laden would probably escape, some White House officials feared. Such a massacre would undermine U.S. interests in the Muslim world and beyond.
The CIA’s top leaders reviewed the proposed raid in June 1998. The discussion revealed similar doubts among senior officers in the Directorate of Operations. In the end, as CIA Director George J. Tenet described it to colleagues years later, the CIA’s relevant chain of command — Jack Downing, then chief of the Directorate of Operations; his deputy James Pavitt; O’Connell and Pillar — all recommended against going forward with the Tarnak raid.
By then, there was no enthusiasm for the plan in the Clinton White House, either. “Am I missing something? Aren’t these people going to be mowed down on their way to the wall?” Clarke asked his White House and CIA colleagues sarcastically, one official recalled.
Tenet never formally presented the raid plan for Clinton’s approval, according to several officials involved.
The decision was cabled to Islamabad. The tribal team’s plans should be set aside, perhaps to be revived later. Meanwhile, the agents were encouraged to continue to look for opportunities to catch bin Laden away from Tarnak, where, among other things, an ambush attempt would carry relatively little risk of civilian deaths.
Some of the working-level CIA officers involved in the planning reacted bitterly to the decision. They believed that the kidnapping plan could succeed.
Less than two months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, two teams of al-Qaeda suicide bombers launched synchronized attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa. In Nairobi, 213 people died and 4,000 were injured. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the toll was 11 dead and 85 wounded. Within months, the New York federal grand jury previously investigating bin Laden delivered an indictment of the Saudi for directing the strikes, among other alleged crimes.
At Langley’s Counterterrorist Center, some CIA analysts and officers were devastated and angry as they watched the televised images of death and rescue in Africa. One of the bin Laden unit’s analysts confronted Tenet. “You are responsible for those deaths,” she said, “because you didn’t act on the information we had when we could have gotten him” through the Tarnak raid, one official involved recalled. The woman was “crying and sobbing, and it was a very rough scene,” the official said.
Tenet stood there and took it. He was a boisterous, emotional man, and he did not shrink from honest confrontation, some of his CIA colleagues felt. After the Africa attacks, Tenet redoubled his pressure on the bin Laden unit’s covert campaign to find their target.
By then, however, bin Laden had dramatically increased his security. He discarded his traceable satellite phone and moved much more stealthily around Afghanistan.
For those who had worked on the plan for the Tarnak raid, the question lingered. Why had the CIA’s leaders turned the idea down?
‘What Are They Waiting For?’
Down in the trenches of a bureaucracy enveloped in secrecy, the resentments festered, amplified by rumors, office grievances and the intensity of the daily grind.
On Aug. 20, acting on intelligence reports of a scheduled meeting of bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, Clinton ordered 75 cruise missiles launched from a submarine in the Arabian Sea against a network of jihadist training camps in eastern Afghanistan. The attack killed at least 21 Pakistani volunteers but missed bin Laden.
By mid-1999, the sense at the White House and in Tenet’s seventh-floor suite at CIA headquarters in Langley was that the Counterterrorist Center had grown too dependent on the TRODPINT tribal agents. One of Tenet’s aides referred to them derisively as “weekend warriors,” middle-aged and now prosperous Afghan fighters with a few Kalashnikovs in their closets.
At the White House, among the few national security officials who knew of the agents’ existence, the attitude evolved from “hopeful skepticism to outright mockery,” as one official recalled.
At one point, the agents moved north to Kabul’s outskirts and rented a farm as a base. They moved in and out of the Afghan capital to scout homes where bin Laden occasionally stayed. They developed a new set of plans: They would strike a Kabul house where bin Laden slept, snatch the Saudi from his bed and retreat from the city in light trucks. The CIA supplied explosives to the agents because their plan called for them to blow up small bridges as they made their escape.
The agents never acted. Their rented farm was a working vineyard. William B. Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at the time who was briefed on the operation, asked his CIA colleagues sarcastically, “So what are they waiting for — the wine to ferment?”
To shake up the hunt, Tenet appointed a fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor, known to his colleagues as Rich, to take charge of the bin Laden unit. Tenet also named Cofer Black, a longtime case officer in Africa who had tracked bin Laden in Sudan, as the Counterterrorist Center’s new director. The bin Laden unit and its chief reported directly to Black; over the next two years, they would work closely together.
When Black took over, the bin Laden unit had about 25 professionals. Most of them were women, and two-thirds had backgrounds as analysts. They called themselves “the Manson Family,” after the crazed convicted murderer Charles Manson, because they had acquired a reputation within the CIA for wild alarmism about the rising al-Qaeda threat.
Their reports described over and over bin Laden’s specific, open threats to inflict mass casualties against Americans. They could not understand why no one else seemed to take the threat as seriously as they did. They pleaded with colleagues that bin Laden was not like the old leftist, theatrical terrorists of the 1970s and ’80s who wanted, in terrorism expert Brian Jenkins’s famous maxim, “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.” Bin Laden wanted many American civilians to die, they warned. They could be dismissive of colleagues who did not share their sense of urgency.
“The rest of the CIA and the intelligence community looked on our efforts as eccentric and at times fanatic,” recalled a former chief of the bin Laden unit. “It was a cult,” agreed a U.S. official who dealt with them. “Jonestown,” said another person involved when asked to sum up the unit’s atmosphere. “I outlawed Kool-Aid.”
Working with the Islamabad station, the bin Laden unit pushed for the recruitment of agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan.
Some of those were informal sources, helping the CIA because of their political opposition to the Taliban. Others were recruited onto the CIA’s payroll. Case officers working the Afghan borderlands began to recruit a few Taliban military leaders, including a brigade-level commander in eastern Afghanistan. One young case officer operating from Islamabad recruited six or seven Taliban commanders operating in the eastern region. Yet none of the recruited agents was close to bin Laden. The CIA could not recruit a single agent inside the core al-Qaeda terrorist leadership.
Black knew that the CIA was in trouble “without penetrations” of bin Laden’s organization, as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to Clinton’s national security aides put it late in 1999. “While we need to disrupt [terrorist] operations . . . we need also to recruit sources,” even though “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.”