The Watchers (18 page)

Kleinsmith always cautioned his audience that he didn't have superpowers. (Some of his more enthusiastic colleagues were less restrained.) The IDC could not direct spy satellites, and they certainly couldn't implant tracking devices on people or their vehicles. “No, we can't do that,” Kleinsmith replied to the Karachi question. But, he explained, the IDC could provide new insights. They could help answer questions. If these two had shown up at Kleinsmith's door, then the establishment intelligence agencies probably had failed to do that.

The officers thanked Kleinsmith for his time, and then they left. Kleinsmith understood that Special Ops worked that way. They gave you nothing until they let you in. The past hour wasn't a presentation. It was an audition.

 

When it came to Al Qaeda, Special Operations most wanted one thing: Boots on the ground to go after the terrorists where they lived, trained, and planned. Al Qaeda had burst onto the scene a year earlier with a brazen, simultaneous attack on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The military hadn't seen anything comparable since the bombings in Beirut fifteen years earlier. This new generation of extremists seemed equally bold but somehow more unmanageable. Al Qaeda, unlike the ideologues who had dogged Americans in Iran and Lebanon, appeared uninterested in negotiation.

The Special Operations officers who'd sought out Kleinsmith were given a straightforward yet utterly perplexing task: Draw up a military campaign plan for dismantling the Al Qaeda network. In October 1999, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had directed Special Operations to map out Al Qaeda and all its support mechanisms, including its linchpin members.

Precisely how they should do that, no one knew. Al Qaeda wasn't a country. It had no obvious infrastructure and an opaque command and control system. It seemed to have a reach beyond Afghanistan, where the intelligence agencies knew Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader, kept his base of operation. But Special Operations could only judge that reach after an attack. If the military wanted to destroy Al Qaeda, then it had to understand it inside and out, just as it would a foreign army. How did the members communicate? How did they move money around? Who gave the orders to cells in the field? These were the weak spots. Disrupt those functions, and Al Qaeda would find it difficult, maybe even impossible, to launch attacks. Special Operations was given clear instructions: Identify the key players, roll them up, and bring down the network. It was more like a hit list than a blueprint for invasion. Death by dismemberment.

The planners kept their work close to the vest, but they gave their mission an oddly conspicuous code name: Able Danger. The word “Able” had been used to describe military exercises for more than two decades. But it was the second word of the nickname that revealed the planners' view of their target and the sense of urgency they attached to the mission.

Special Operations had ideas about how to hit Al Qaeda. First, they'd strike the terrorists' redoubts with AC-130 gunships, fearsome birds of prey armed with a bewildering array of guns and cannons. Alternatively, or perhaps in concert, commandos and elite special forces could stalk and eliminate individual Al Qaeda members on the ground. Special Ops had plenty of fire and manpower for the job. But they lacked an essential ingredient—specific, “actionable” intelligence that showed them where to aim.

For years now the military had depended largely upon the CIA for that information, and commanders had grown impatient with the paucity of results. The CIA had practically no presence in Afghanistan since the Soviets had abandoned their occupation in 1989. The agency had reestablished contacts more recently, and they were paying some dividends. But these sources were mostly tribal chiefs and rebels trying to oust the Taliban regime. They had their own agenda.

The CIA's counterterrorist center, along with a unit at headquarters solely devoted to tracking bin Laden, believed their Afghan sources could say reliably when he was on the move, where he might be on a particular day, perhaps even where he planned to spend the night. Locating bin Laden, and either killing or capturing him, became the agency's chief strategy for undermining Al Qaeda. The CIA had devised a dramatic plan in which the tribes would pounce on bin Laden in the middle of the night and then move him to a hiding place. They'd hold him there for a month or so while things quieted down and any suspicion of U.S. involvement wore off. (The agency and the White House were deeply concerned about antagonizing extremist elements in neighboring Pakistan, a key domino in the unstable region.) Once the tribes had an opening, they'd spirit bin Laden from his secret location and then put him on a U.S. aircraft, which would take the terrorist leader back to America for trial, or they'd hand him over to a friendly government. The chief of the CIA's bin Laden tracking unit thought it was a solid plan, the best anyone had devised so far. And the agency's chief Afghan field operative cabled headquarters that it was “almost as professional and detailed . . . as would be done by any U.S. military special operations element.”

Special Operations begged to differ. This looked like amateur hour. A half-cocked, risky scheme that relied far too heavily on unreliable locals. In the time they wanted to hold bin Laden, he could die, be discovered, escape, or make a deal with the tribes. The commander of the military's Joint Special Operations forces said the CIA wanted results “on the cheap.” The senior military leadership refused to outsource bin Laden's capture and then risk American lives when it came time for U.S. forces to extract him. Memories of another failed attempt to snatch a wanted terrorist loomed in their calculations: the disastrous Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. Then, nineteen soldiers died in an ambush in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Warlord loyalists dragged their burned corpses through the streets. The military blamed the disaster in large part on poor intelligence gathering before the strike.

So it was under this umbrella of mistrust and hesitation that the Able Danger team tried to develop another way forward. They wanted to broaden their focus beyond bin Laden, and to think about Al Qaeda more systematically. Kleinsmith's presentation had made a deep impression on the two officers. Perhaps he had something they could use. In mid-January 2000, Commander Scott Philpot, the lead in the pair, called Kleinsmith and asked him to attend a special all-hands planning session, to be held at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. Able Danger was going back to the drawing board, and he wanted Kleinsmith's ideas.

Kleinsmith was unsure what to expect. He'd never sat in one room with so many emissaries of the big three-letter agencies. The CIA sent a team. The National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency also sent their reps. As Kleinsmith sized up the gathering, he thought that they didn't seem especially collegial. He guessed that this might have been the first time they'd ever come together in one place.

Philpot hadn't asked Kleinsmith to give a formal presentation, or even to ask questions. Instead, he should be the fly on the wall. Were the group's methods sound? Were they overlooking anything?

To start things off, a CIA analyst, billed as the leading expert on the life and times of Osama bin Laden, laid out what he knew, or believed, about the terrorist leader. Most of what Kleinsmith knew about Al Qaeda came from the news. And he knew nothing of the agency's arduous slog to track bin Laden, or that they'd come closer to him than anyone else. But what the analyst had to say just didn't make any sense: Bin Laden would be dead within six months. According to intelligence, he was suffering from pancreatic cancer.

You've got to be kidding me,
Kleinsmith thought. He couldn't imagine that the start point for a major campaign plan began and ended with the death of one man. Even if bin Laden had cancer, what about his second-tier leaders? Wouldn't they just take his place? And if the CIA had this kind of specific intelligence, then why wasn't it enough for the Able Danger team to act upon? Kleinsmith had been in the room for only a few moments, but he could see things didn't add up.

The analysts from the other agencies each gave their assessments of Al Qaeda. And in their often emphatic presentations, Kleinsmith recognized a certain myopia. This was the kind of narrow analysis produced by people who relied mostly on one kind of information. For the CIA, it was human spies on the ground. For the NSA, intercepted phone calls and communications. The satellite guys had their photographs, and so on. They all had gotten too close to the target. And in the process they'd let their own parochial biases guide them.

Kleinsmith considered himself a member of a new generation. These guys were the old guard. They'd become powerful, and they forgot to question their own assumptions about how the world worked. Or maybe they couldn't. Maybe that would undermine their dominance. Maybe that was why they were starting to yell at one another now.

Kleinsmith recognized that he was an outsider. And he wasn't so impolitic as to apprise the group of his candid assessment. At least, not without an i nvitation.

During a lunch break Kleinsmith buttonholed Philpot and gave him his assessment of the group's dynamic, as he'd been asked. These analysts were basing their conclusions on hardened assumptions, he said. Maybe those assumptions were good ones, but the analysts had closed themselves off to alternatives. They weren't fusing their ideas; they were bickering. And by his read, the course of action for Able Danger was being dictated by whoever could yell the loudest. About the only thing they could agree on was that the United States should hit Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But here too they seemed to have excluded other options. How could they be so sure that would do the job? Hadn't the network demonstrated a reach far beyond its remote headquarters?

Kleinsmith didn't think he was being especially insightful—just observant. He made Philpot an offer. “Let me do a quick, preliminary run on the data sets we have at the IDC and see what the picture is. I'll call my guys right now.” Philpot agreed; he seemed equally unimpressed with the results so far.

 

Kleinsmith told two of his analysts to start with a broad, keyword search involving Al Qaeda. They ran the usual sources—public information on the Internet, as well as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, a private network that the Defense Department used to transmit classified messages.

Ninety minutes later, the analysts passed the results back to Kleinsmith. They startled him. The IDC had found Al Qaeda “footprints” around the world, in the form of news reports, cable traffic, and other sources that when viewed collectively showed the network hardly was confined to its base in Afghanistan. Hits popped up around the world, and a lot of it came from open sources. The information the intelligence community lacked could be right at its fingertips.

Philpot asked Kleinsmith to present his findings to the group. To make it more intelligible, he ran the data through ThemeScape, one of the mapmaking tools that displayed information as a series of peaks and valleys. Al Qaeda seemed to have four major centers of gravity, he explained, indicated by the high volume of reporting pointing to Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. Everywhere he looked, there were mountains waiting to be excavated. Nuggets to be discovered. Leads to be followed.
Here
, he seemed to be saying.
Don't you see?

Kleinsmith read the faces in the room.
Now who was kidding?
they appeared to be asking

“Centers of gravity”? In practically every major hot spot around the globe? This was absurdly broad. useless.
Who is this kid?
he imagined them thinking.
Some punk major from an intelligence outfit no one's ever heard of? You've spent an hour on this. We've spent years. And where did you find this stuff again? The
Internet
? You're wasting our time.

In moments like this, the dutiful Boy Scout gave way to the petulant upstart. The analysts' hostility emboldened Kleinsmith. These were the guys who didn't “get it,
”
he told himself. And not because they couldn't comprehend the technology, but because it threatened them. He threatened them. This nobody was pointing out, on a map, where the nation's most exalted spies had failed to look.

If Able Danger wanted to understand Al Qaeda, he declared, if they wanted to attack it on all fronts, then they had to plunge deeper. They should start here, in this ocean he had collected. Why did the big letter agencies presume the government had the best information? Clearly, a lot of journalists, academics, and others grazing on open sources had come up with some powerful insights about the network. He had just demonstrated that. With more work his analysts could suss out meaningful signals in this noise, separate the real leads from the garbage, and come back with what the military wanted: a list of Al Qaeda's weak spots, the keys to its demise.

Philpot had seen enough. As the meeting concluded he announced that Kleinsmith and the IDC would take the lead on the Al Qaeda mapping plan. Able Danger would shift its attention and support to a wider campaign. The new guys were in charge. And Kleinsmith was a marked man.

 

A few weeks later, in February 2000, Able Danger gave Kleinsmith his first marching orders: “Start with the words ‘Al Qaeda,' and go.”

The IDC team worked as it had during the China experiment. A small group of analysts, never more than four, started broadly. They reaped a harvest of Web pages and classified reports, then got their hands dirty sifting the pieces. They worked quickly, and under pressure, since demands from the IDC's other clients—the various military commands—hadn't abated.

Kleinsmith drew up an ambitious wish list of more than one hundred military and intelligence databases that he wanted to access in addition to the sources already available. He thought that the richness of the harvest, and therefore the analysis, would increase as he fed more data into the system. The new sources ranged from the merely “classified” to those designated so sensitive that access was given only as needed.