Intelligence Quotient: Caught Off-Guard By Terror, the CIA Fights to Catch Up
gabriel.s...@gmail.com
Catch Up --- It Fills Holes Exposed Sept. 11 With Agents New and Old;
`There to Get al Qaeda' --- Still, Where's bin Laden?
By David S. Cloud. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York,
N.Y.: Apr 15, 2002. pg. A.1
Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc Apr 15, 2002
America's covert war in Afghanistan began two weeks after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, when a small team of Central Intelligence Agency
personnel drove across the border from Pakistan and headed for an
anti-Taliban stronghold in the Panjshir Valley.
Leading the armed squad was a paunchy veteran case officer who had
spent 20 years undercover in Kabul, Karachi and Tehran. Close to
retirement from a headquarters desk job, he had been rushed back into
the field because the agency didn't have enough younger officers with
experience operating in Afghanistan. He returned home in November,
nearly 20 pounds lighter, and signed a new contract that sent him back
to Afghanistan for another tour, according to people familiar with the
operation.
On a much grander scale, at headquarters and abroad, the CIA has been
attempting the same kind of crash makeover over the past seven months.
It has been a big job. The Sept. 11 attacks caught the agency unawares
-- the legacy of deep post-Cold War budget cuts, multiplying missions,
and a cultural resistance to change that had left it with scant
resources to take on growing terrorism threats, including Osama bin
Laden and his al Qaeda network.
Since the attacks, the CIA has spent millions of dollars and deployed
hundreds of personnel to correct the problem. The effort has resulted
in the capture of hundreds of al Qaeda fighters and operatives around
the world, and the collection of vast quantities of documents. But U.S.
intelligence officials concede that they know little about the bin
Laden organization's continuing operations or where most of its leaders
are hiding. That's partly because of the extraordinary discipline of al
Qaeda, officials say, and the difficulty of penetrating the secretive
group.
CIA Director George Tenet says the agency was working aggressively to
destroy al Qaeda well before Sept. 11. In several public appearances
recently, he has vehemently disputed criticism that the agency
underestimated the threat or failed in not heading off the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "There's no perfection in this
business," he said in February Senate testimony. The CIA, he said, has
"been at war with al Qaeda for over five years."
Even so, the changes at the agency and its activities in Afghanistan
since Sept. 11, as described in interviews with current and former
intelligence officials and others familiar with the CIA, constitute the
largest and most rapid reorganization in its 55-year history.
Six days after the attacks, in remarks televised on the CIA
headquarters' closed-circuit system, James Pavitt, chief of the CIA's
clandestine wing, laid out the plan. He announced that he was pulling
in hundreds of employees from other parts of the CIA to join the
counter-terrorism effort, and that several legendary case officers had
agreed to return from retirement to help direct the fight. Officers
began moving abroad in what has become the agency's biggest covert
deployment in more than a decade.
In addition, dozens of retired agents have been activated from the
Clandestine Service Reserve, a standby unit of retired officers with
top-secret security clearances. Other personnel were recruited for the
agency's paramilitary unit, called the Special Activities Division, in
a hiring spree of former military officers. Anyone with relevant
language skills or experience in Afghanistan and environs was
particularly sought-after, officials say. New hires were hurried
through a crash four-week training program, schooled in logistics and
communications and briefed on what to expect in Afghanistan.
The hiring spree has had an impact in the field. Dozens of agency
personnel operate from Kabul and smaller teams are deployed around the
country. At Bagram air base, 30 miles from Kabul, CIA technicians
monitor live video feeds from Predator drones searching for fleeing al
Qaeda. In Herat, two CIA officers, dubbed the "secret squirrels" by
U.S. troops in the area, show up wearing rolled-up Afghan hats called
pakuls at weekly meetings with powerful warlord Ismail Khan to discuss
Taliban or al Qaeda fighters who may be hiding in the region or trying
to escape across the nearby border with Iran.
CIA officers on the ground helped produce the rapid success of the
military campaign against the Taliban. The war's first American
casualty was CIA operative Johnny "Mike" Spann, killed in an al Qaeda
prison uprising. CIA officers helped direct the air strikes that
brought the Taliban to its knees within weeks. They also helped advise,
arm and bring together the disparate bands of anti-Taliban militias
that ultimately changed the power structure of Afghanistan.
All this, accomplished in a matter of months, is far more than the
agency had managed in years. By the mid-1990s, the CIA's directorate of
operations -- the part of the CIA that handles covert operations -- had
shrunk its clandestine work force by 25% and pulled back its overseas
staff dramatically. In a cost-cutting arrangement known as "home
basing," most of the counter-terrorism case officers responsible for
recruiting spies worked from headquarters in Langley, Va., and made
only occasional trips into the field.
In Europe, the agency mostly abandoned its efforts to recruit Arabs
with information about Islamic extremists in the mid-1990s, after
Germany and France demanded an end to covert operations on their soil.
In Pakistan, once one of the largest CIA bases in the world, most
personnel were pulled out at the end of the Afghan war against the
Soviets in 1989.
At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA had a station chief and a
handful of case officers in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, but only
one- or two-person bases in other critical cities, including Peshawar,
near the Afghanistan border. The CIA's representative in Karachi,
Pakistan's largest city, was a contract employee who spent six months a
year in the region, and the rest at his home in the Virginia
countryside, according to several former CIA officers.
When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 and offered refuge to Mr. bin
Laden, the CIA created a separate headquarters team to track al Qaeda.
The so-called bin Laden operational unit worked out of an office
building several miles from the agency's Virginia headquarters. But
with limited funding and only a small number of field agents, it spent
most of its time urging foreign intelligence services to keep tabs on
al Qaeda sympathizers. For real-time information, it relied on
intercepts of Mr. bin Laden's phone conversations, taken off a
U.S.-made satellite telephone. Those dried up after the tactic was
reported in the news media and Mr. bin Laden stopped using the phone.
Occasionally, when it could muster the cash and the backing of top
officials, the bin Laden squad tried more aggressive tactics. After two
U.S. embassies in Africa were bombed -- an operation quickly traced to
Mr. bin Laden -- the group sent personnel to Pakistan to train dozens
of Pakistani commandos with hopes of someday inserting them into
Afghanistan to kill or capture Mr. bin Laden. The Pakistanis pulled out
after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who backed the U.S. strategy, was
overthrown in an October 1999 coup.
In early 2001 -- after al Qaeda operatives bombed the USS Cole in Yemen
-- the group got the green light to recruit inside Afghanistan. A small
group of CIA officers were dispatched to the Afghan-Pakistani border to
search for allies who could ferret out intelligence on Mr. bin Laden
and harass the Taliban -- to "bleed them white," as one U.S. official
puts it. The recruitment effort was still in its early stages when the
attacks were launched against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The day after the attacks, Mr. Tenet, the director of central
intelligence, gathered employees in the CIA's soundproofed auditorium.
"We did not stop the latest, terrible assaults," he said, according to
a transcript of his remarks. "The important thing for us now is to do
our job, to run to ground a vicious foe -- one without heart or pity."
Within days, President Bush had signed a classified "finding"
authorizing the CIA to eliminate al Qaeda's top leadership and giving
it wide latitude to use targeted killings and other messy covert
tactics that were tightly constrained in recent years.
And the crash mobilization began. The shrunken work force of the
agency's operations directorate was a major problem. Retirements and
layoffs had left the clandestine service stocked with veterans nearing
retirement and junior officers with little operational experience,
current and former officials say. During the peace-dividend 1990s, it
had hired only a few dozen new case agents each year.
But once officers were drawn out of retirement or transferred to the
antiterror effort, intelligence officials quickly began assembling
teams for deployment into and around Afghanistan. Most teams were
headed by a leader who could speak either Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's
two main languages, and included at least one operative from the
Special Activities Division skilled in handling weapons and logistics.
A new seven-member headquarters unit, known as the Counterterrorism
Center-Special Operations, was put in charge of the teams and the rest
of the agency's Afghanistan operations. Cofer Black, its new director,
is a former field agent who impressed White House officials in the days
after Sept. 11 with his confident briefings about the CIA's plans and
capabilities inside Afghanistan.
Despite telling the White House that it was prepared to quickly move
into Afghanistan, the agency had very few personal contacts with the
Northern Alliance leadership. In the late 1990s, the CIA tried to
cultivate the group's chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, sending him $50,000 a
year. But the cash had been delivered by British paramilitary teams,
partly to ensure CIA deniability. Three days before the Sept. 11
attacks, Mr. Massoud was assassinated by suspected al Qaeda operatives,
and the agency had to scramble to introduce itself to his successor,
Gen. Mohammed Qassim Fahim.
In the fourth week of September, the agency began deploying its newly
marshaled operatives, eventually sending about 100 men in ahead of U.S.
Special Forces to find landing zones and safe houses for the troops.
Armed with large wads of cash, they also scouted Taliban and al Qaeda
positions, and wooed Afghan warlords with arms and gifts, including
four-wheel drive vehicles. Once the war was under way, the agency
continued to "manage" the warlords, calibrating U.S. support to each,
depending on how aggressive and cooperative they proved in the fight.
The first CIA team into Afghanistan in late September set up a base
camp behind Northern Alliance lines in the Panjshir Valley. Unsure of
the Americans' plans, Northern Alliance commanders were "very, very
nervous" when the CIA arrived, according to a U.S. official. "We said,
`We're there to get al Qaeda. We're going to help you defeat the
Taliban, and if you lash yourselves to us, it will happen.'"
The CIA teams worried especially about rivalries among fractious
anti-Taliban commanders. To keep the Northern Alliance together, they
decided to build up Mr. Fahim's power, placing him in charge of doling
out American largesse. When the Special Forces units began arriving by
helicopter in mid-October, they were met by CIA counterparts who, as
Mr. Black had promised, had safe houses and reports of Taliban and al
Qaeda positions in hand.
They were under strict orders, however, not to suggest targets for U.S.
bombing runs. The rule was in part the result of the 1999 war in
Kosovo, when the CIA mistakenly sent U.S. bombers against the Chinese
Embassy in Belgrade.
The Pentagon imposed its own limits on one of the CIA's most effective
weapons: its fleet of four armed Predator surveillance drones. Early in
the war, CIA operatives watched live video fed from one of the aircraft
hovering over a compound near Kandahar that showed a group of men,
including one thought to be Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. Under
the military rules of engagement, the CIA couldn't fire if the blast of
the Predator's Hellfire missile might harm civilians. In this case,
according to one senior official, the estimated blast area included the
corner of a small mud hut that was thought to house civilians. By the
time the CIA operatives finally received special clearance from
Pentagon officials in Tampa, Fla., to fire, it was too late; the group
had left.
Once Kabul fell, the CIA plan called for fomenting an anti-Taliban
uprising among southern Pashtuns. The agency had contacts among tribal
leaders, some of whom were living in Pakistan, but it took weeks to
identify which of them could quickly put men in the field and were
willing to follow U.S. orders. Some local leaders were still bitter
with the CIA for abandoning them after the war with the Soviets.
As the war swung the U.S. way, that changed. Payments ranged from
$5,000 for village elders who could supply personnel to more than
$100,000 for warlords who could field hundreds of troops, a person
familiar with the matter said. "We were reaching out to every commander
that we could," an intelligence official said, adding that later,
people were "seeking us out."
To eject the Taliban from its stronghold of Kandahar, the agency
enlisted former Kandahar Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai, as well as Hamid
Karzai, who has since become Afghanistan's interim leader. The CIA and
the Pentagon airlifted weapons and supplies from a base in Uzbekistan.
In a few weeks, the CIA operation helped create a force of more than
3,000 fighters that claimed Kandahar after a sustained U.S. bombing of
Taliban positions around the city.
The CIA has had far less success in tracking and penetrating al Qaeda
-- its main task since the Taliban's defeat. At Tora Bora, Mr. bin
Laden's mountain redoubt, the CIA spread the word of million-dollar
payments for the Afghan who could find the al Qaeda chief. Instead,
some intelligence officials suspect, local fighters took bribes from al
Qaeda for letting large numbers of fighters escape.
U.S. search efforts so far have yielded only two big fish: Muhammed
Atef, a senior bin Laden lieutenant who was spotted early in the war by
a CIA drone and killed; and Abu Zubaydah, the man believed to be
charged with reorganizing al Qaeda, captured last month in Pakistan.
U.S. intelligence officials say they received tips about Mr. Zubaydah's
whereabouts from al Qaeda prisoners. He was also sloppy in his
communication by e-mail and other methods with comrades on the run,
officials say. The CIA managed to track him to a walled two-story house
in the city of Faisalabad.
The CIA has gotten a few other tantalizing bits of information from the
Afghan and Pakistani intelligence services, officials say. One
unreleased bit of videotape found in Afghanistan and now in CIA hands
shows Mr. bin Laden camping at night, possibly after Sept. 11, with
only a few companions, an indication that he may have abandoned his
large entourage and convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles making him even
harder to track. The Afghan intelligence service, which now draws
almost all of its financing from the CIA, is also keeping tabs on one
of Mr. bin Laden's sons in Afghanistan, hoping he will provide clues
about his father's location. So far, he hasn't.
Sailor Saturn
<gabriel.s...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1146153363.9...@e56g2000cwe.googlegroups.com...
End of Baloney.
Decribe this paunchy guy, and I can tell you his
name.DO?Veteran?BadKnees?Uhuh.
You all think I am a joker, and I told you this train isnt stopping.
It is not going to stop.