The Watchers (41 page)

But Alexander also had a contentious relationship with Mike Hayden, the man he was replacing. The two had sparred over how much access Alexander's analysts, particularly those working in the IDC, should have to raw signals data. Alexander wanted Hayden to bend the pipes toward his people, but Hayden had resisted. Now Alexander was the head plumber.

Hayden had left Fort Meade earlier in the year, moving steadily and considerably up the bureaucratic ladder, as was his way. In April 2005, he became the principal deputy director of national intelligence, the number two man in the community. He was the first person ever to hold the post, which was part of the new Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created in response to the 9/11 Commission. It had recommended a new upper management to corral the restive agencies and force them to cooperate.

Depending on how one chose to view the assignment, Hayden had either been handed the keys to the kingdom or been made to walk the plank. The deputy slot was a political post and required the Senate's approval. That would mean public hearings in which the dirty laundry of the war on terror might have an airing. Still, the fact that Bush had tapped Hayden, his leader in the digital global terrorist hunt, was a clear signal of the president's confidence and his approval.

Even if Hayden made it through confirmation unscathed, he'd be taking on a thankless job. As the deputy, he was guaranteed to spend most of his tenure warring over budgets as the new office asserted its dominance. Congress might have slapped the word “director” onto Hayden's forthcoming title, but that didn't make it so. The defense secretary still controlled the vast majority of all intelligence dollars, and the new DNI's office didn't have the authority to overrule him. Indeed, the new law didn't give the DNI the necessary authorities to enforce the policies he might choose to implement.

Still, Hayden was getting a promotion and, with it, a huge boost to his military clout: Bush put him up for his fourth star, the highest rank that the service could bestow. That made Hayden not only a full general but the highest-ranking military intelligence officer in all the armed forces. And Hayden could claim one more bragging right: He was the first career Air Force intelligence officer ever to earn a fourth star. Hayden didn't resign from the Air Force, and that troubled some lawmakers. The new national intelligence office was supposed to be independent. In Washington that usually meant run by civilians. As if to ease concerns about militarization, the Bush administration picked a counterweight of sorts for the top slot.

John Negroponte, a career diplomat whose only experience with intelligence was reading it, seemed an unlikely pick. Negroponte had been the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and had previously represented the country at the United Nations and in Honduras. The Central American post, which he held in the first term of the Reagan administration, had endeared him to John Poindexter, who thought that Negroponte was one of the few people in the State Department who supported the president's goals in Nicaragua. Negroponte carried his own stains from the Iran-Contra affair, but they were insufficient to derail his nomination to the top intelligence job.

Though a capable diplomat, Negroponte was out of his depth in his new role. He quickly developed a habit of leaving the office early. It was customary for a deputy to take over day-to-day management of any large organization. But Hayden was no ordinary backup man. He brought an incomparable résumé and deep institutional knowledge. Negroponte might have been at the top on paper, but there was no mistaking who was really in charge.

Hayden had a new job. Townsend a promotion. Poindexter had begun his third act. The spring of 2004 kicked off a game of musical chairs that lasted well into the next year. This was a predictable and time-honored Washington custom, particularly heading into a second presidential term. But 2005 would be a year of surprises. The first one came in June, when news broke of an intelligence program that few had ever heard of and that those in the know presumed was dead and buried.

Able Danger had surfaced.

 

Congressman Curt Weldon had been hearing things. There was a lot more going on at the Information Dominance Center than even he, its biggest supporter in Congress, had known.

The first hints came in May. Weldon had a meeting with an Army reserve officer working at the Defense Intelligence Agency named Tony Shaffer. He'd been asked to meet with the congressman to help drum up funds for a new data analysis program the Navy wanted to launch. But once Weldon had Shaffer in his office on the Hill, the conversation turned to Able Danger.

Weldon had heard about the program a few days earlier, from Scott Philpot, the Navy officer who had first brought Erik Kleinsmith into the secret operation and tapped his team of analysts to run intelligence on Al Qaeda. Weldon wanted to know what happened to all the work the team had done. He asked Shaffer to fill in some details. So he gave the congressman the briefing he'd presented two years earlier to staff members of the 9/11 Commission.

Weldon was surprised to hear this. He had read the report, and he didn't recall a word about Able Danger. His chief of staff grabbed a copy, scanned through it, and told his boss that this code name was nowhere to be found in the pages.

Shaffer said that he had contacted the commission staff and offered to tell them what he knew about Able Danger. In October 2003, some staffers flew to Bagram, Afghanistan, where Shaffer was stationed, and they interviewed him. It was late in the commission's work, and back in Washington, members were writing the final report. The commission found Shaffer's interview unsatisfying; he hadn't provided enough definitive information, or proof, about Able Danger's activities, and so the report never mentioned it.

Weldon was baffled. As he'd just learned, Able Danger was the Special Operations Command's program to hunt down and kill Al Qaeda members. It had been reviewed and approved by the top echelons of the military. How could this narrative be left out of the final accounting of the 9/11 terrorist attack, particularly since it appeared to show the military was moving in to thwart Al Qaeda? Weldon had no immediate explanation, but his confusion was turned into rage over what he learned next.

Former members of the Able Danger team now claimed that they had identified the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, more than a year before the attacks. Using the IDC's advanced analytics, they had zeroed in on a sleeper cell in New York. When team members tried to approach the FBI with the information so agents could investigate, they said, they were shut down by higher authorities. Eventually, all the intelligence Able Danger had collected was destroyed.

It was a bombshell. Weldon had spent a fair share of his career in Congress railing against the intelligence and military bureaucracies. He had pitched the Information Dominance Center as a novel, cutting-edge capability for preventing acts of terrorism like the 9/11 attacks. Now he discovered that when the center had a chance to do just that, no one had lifted a finger. The Able Danger team had apparently been stymied by higher-ups in the Pentagon and dismissed by the FBI.

Over the next few weeks Shaffer gave Weldon more details about Able Danger. It turned out that Weldon had actually become aware of the program much earlier, without fully realizing it. Two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, staff from the IDC had brought Weldon a smaller version of one of their massive link charts. It measured only two by three feet and was a mock-up prepared by a contractor that had once worked for the center.

Weldon had acted as if it were a smoking gun. He'd left his office and headed for the White House. He had brought along Eileen Preisser, an analyst who had worked with Kleinsmith. She had become one of the congressman's “friends” in the intelligence community.

Weldon had shown the chart to Stephen Hadley, President Bush's deputy national security adviser. It was a frantic time, with officials bracing for another attack. Weldon had been driven to show Hadley that the very capabilities he'd been promoting all these years had, in fact, revealed something remarkable—an Al Qaeda presence inside the United States.

Hadley had taken a look at the chart, and he seemed impressed. “I have to show this to the big man,” he said, meaning Bush.

It was the last Weldon ever saw or heard of that chart. Perhaps the congressman had believed that the NSC staff would investigate, and that he'd learn the truth eventually, because after that meeting with Hadley, Weldon didn't speak publicly about the chart. Not until he learned that it was the product of a secret program that apparently had identified Atta.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2005 Weldon spoke with others who'd worked on the classified program. A new narrative emerged. These bright, innovative analysts from Army intelligence and at Special Operations had zeroed in on the 9/11 hijackers, and in the United States, possibly in Manhattan or Brooklyn. But, true to form, the recalcitrant and hidebound bureaucracy had failed to act.

Weldon screamed cover-up. In June he took to the House floor in a forty-five-minute address. “For the first time, I can tell our colleagues that one of our agencies not only identified the New York cell of Mohamed Atta and two of the terrorists, but actually made a recommendation to bring the FBI in to take out that cell,” Weldon declared triumphantly. “Why, then, did they not proceed? That is a question that needs to be answered.”

Weldon went to the press. In August the Able Danger story went national. Weldon was quoted by the wire services and the major papers, and he appeared on the news networks. Shaffer came forward with his own account. He said that he'd tried to alert officials at the FBI, and that he'd even set up meetings, but he was thwarted by senior Pentagon officials. The nation was gripped by this latest twist in the 9/11 saga. Had the United States government actually missed the chance to prevent the mass murder of nearly three thousand people?

Weldon launched a crusade to expose the FBI and the Pentagon for covering up Able Danger's discoveries. For him, that was the unforgivable sin. Weldon blasted the 9/11 Commission, which he thought had failed to see the program's significance because it only conducted limited interviews with the former team members. He declared that the Bush administration's efforts to dismiss Able Danger amounted to a scandal “worse than Watergate.”

Weldon was raving. He looked unhinged. He made long, bombastic speeches, extolling the IDC and Able Danger but also rubbing the intelligence community's nose in their own undeniable failures. He wanted to remind the world that he'd been clamoring for intelligence reform, and of how he'd told many administration officials to look closely at the IDC's good work. Along with “cover-up” came another refrain: “I told you so.”

Had a calmer voice spoken, the public might have learned the real truth about Able Danger. The story was far more complex, and more disheartening, than the one Weldon was telling.

Erik Kleinsmith sure thought so.

 

When Kleinsmith finally went public, in September, it was under oath before a Senate panel. He had ceded the media field to Weldon, who sucked all the oxygen out of the story anyway. For weeks Weldon had been raging over destroyed evidence and deleted charts. He railed against the Pentagon lawyers who got in the Able Danger team's way. “I'll tell you how stupid it was,” Weldon told the Associated Press during an interview in his office. “They put stickies on the faces of Mohamed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed and they said you can't talk to Atta because he's here [legally].”

The kernel of the story was correct. The lawyers did intercede over privacy regulations and concerns about U.S. persons. And the team did stick Post-it notes over the faces of people on the link charts. But Kleinsmith didn't believe that Atta was among them. And he said so at the hearing.

“I myself do not remember seeing either a picture or his name on any charts,” Kleinsmith told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The chairman, Arlen Specter, a Republican from Weldon's home state of Pennsylvania, asked Kleinsmith whether he could corroborate the accounts of Preisser, Philpot, Shaffer, and now two others who also claimed they saw Atta.

“I cannot corroborate them completely and say that, yes, they saw it,” Kleinsmith replied. He tried hard not to refute them. He was sure that they
thought
what they saw was real. “I believed them implicitly,” Kleinsmith said. But he wouldn't and couldn't back up their story.

Specter asked Kleinsmith whether Able Danger had identified a specific terrorist operation in a U.S. city.

“No specific operation in the United States,” Kleinsmith said. “Only a presence that was known.”

Kleinsmith was in the best position to know. And sitting before the imposing dais, he described how he'd personally destroyed all the evidence about Al Qaeda's global and U.S. presences.

“We were forced to destroy all data,” he said. All the charts, all the reporting. Anything related to Able Danger was gone, he told the senators.

They seemed incredulous, as if Kleinsmith was surely mistaken when he said everything was gone. “What kind of information was deleted?” Specter inquired.

“Everything,”
Kleinsmith replied. “Everything that we had.” How could he say it more clearly? There was nothing left.

Kleinsmith spelled out how Able Danger progressed, how it moved from an information harvest into a painstaking but technologically enhanced phase of analysis. “We were trying to get a worldwide perspective of exactly where Al Qaeda functioned and operated,” he said. “We were unable to get to the details for specific persons or information in the United States before we were shut down.”