The “evil ones,” as President George W. Bush likes to call the terrorist mastermind and his henchmen, remained maddeningly elusive. But the evidence they left behind underscores why it is essential to stalk bin Laden and his lieutenants to the ends of the earth. In Al Qaeda safe houses and crude laboratories around Afghanistan, investigators have found plans to launch chemical and biological attacks against American and European targets. U.S. intelligence officials tell NEWSWEEK that they now believe that Al Qaeda has successfully obtained a quantity of radioactive materials that could be used to build what the experts call a “radiological dispersal device,” better known as a dirty bomb. Such a weapon, set off in a crowded city, would not have nearly the destructive or deadly effect of a nuclear weapon, but it would be terrifying and demoralizing to a people still trying to heal from September 11.
The war against terror, as Bush never stops saying, is a long way from over–even if bin Laden is killed or captured. The president is right to warn against complacency. There is a risk that as the terrorist attacks on America begin to fade in the public consciousness, Washington’s TV-fed culture of scandal and conflict will reassert itself. The talking heads and politicians will keep the story alive in the familiar way, by featuring exposes and holding hearings to point fingers and assign blame. The national-security bureaucracy will respond in classic fashion: by hunkering down into a defensive crouch. Important momentum in the war against terror–a complex global manhunt that requires cooperation between rival nations and intelligence services–will inevitably be lost.
In order to understand what could be sacrificed by a return to business as usual, it is important to look back at the historical ebb and flow of the national-security mind-set. There has been lots of talk about 9-11 as a turning point in the life of the nation. For the military and the intelligence community, the attacks have been transformative, too, and mostly for the better. The national-security bureaucracy, which had grown sclerotic and risk-averse, was jolted by September 11. Necessity forced the Pentagon as well as the FBI and CIA to shake off old, slow-moving and suspicious ways and work together as an effective fighting force. The horror of 9-11 re-centered the pendulum that had swung too far as a reaction against the scandals and blunders of the Vietnam era.
But the greatest changes are very much still in progress; real reforms could easily be abandoned and the status quo allowed to reassert itself. The behind-the-scenes struggle to change the national-security mind-set–from plodding and muscle-bound to nimble and bold–is a critical and largely untold story of the new war on terrorism.
The military and intelligence communities are made up of more than men (and, increasingly, women) and their high-tech machines. Culture also counts. The institutional norms, mores, rules–written and unwritten–that govern expectations and behavior matter just as much, if not more, than the latest gizmos and weaponry. Cultures are shaped by experience–by history, both good and bad. For the institutions safeguarding national security, the history that mattered most was, at least until September 11, the era spanned by the Vietnam War.
As the 1960s began, the U.S. military was still floating on an aura of World War II invincibility. The top brass was, for the most part, more hawkish than its civilian masters. At the CIA, the spooks had been unleashed to accomplish, by stealth and subterfuge, what the soldiers could not. But by the mid-’70s, after defeat in Vietnam and scandals that exposed the agency’s failed assassination plots and other “dirty tricks,” both the Pentagon and Langley were reeling. At the FBI, meanwhile, the age of the all-powerful J. Edgar Hoover was ending, and with it the bureau’s unsavory practices of blackmailing public officials and spying on innocent Americans. With the press and Congress in full cry, the FBI and CIA were encumbered with a new set of rules to guard against future abuses. Many of these reforms were healthy and necessary. But as Hoover’s most aggressive G-men were eased out and the CIA’s swashbuckling “old boys” were forced into retirement, they were replaced by more-careful careerists. The greatest fear of a modern spook or gumshoe is not being ambushed in a back alley but being dragged before a congressional committee investigating the latest scandal. Likewise in the military, once gung-ho second lieutenants bloodied in Vietnam–and then betrayed, or so it seemed, on the home front–became very cautious, even passive, colonels and generals. The most notable exemplar of that era is Colin Powell, whose Powell doctrine roughly decrees that the troops should never be sent in to fight except in massive force that is certain to win, with full support at home and a quick “exit strategy.”
That was before September 11. Striking back at bin Laden before Al Qaeda can hit America again calls for a whole new attitude and approach. After several failed coups in the ’50s and ’60s and spectacularly blown covert operations like the Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s capacity to run paramilitary operations had withered to a skeleton force. But in just a few short weeks in September and October, the agency was able to ramp up a bold cadre of paramilitary specialists to go into Afghanistan, collect intelligence and work with tribal leaders against the Taliban. (America’s first combat casualty, Mike Spann, was one of these CIA operators.) The new spooks are long on muscle (many, like Spann, are former Marines) and short on language skills and espionage “trade craft.” Rebuilding the CIA’s “clandestine service” to penetrate “hard targets” like terrorist cells will take patience–and probably an absence of scandal. But CIA Director George Tenet has the strong support of President Bush, and nine months ago he promoted Buzzy Krongard, a damn-the-torpedoes former Marine captain and investment banker, to ride herd on the agency’s hidebound and often querulous bureaucracy.
At the Pentagon in the post-Vietnam era, the top brass had been very wary of using Special Forces. In the eyes of many regular Army officers, the Green Berets, so romantic to President John F. Kennedy and the movie-going public in the ’60s, were wild “snake eaters” and “knuckle draggers” responsible for sucking the Army into the Vietnam quagmire. Afghanistan has seen a vindication of the Green Berets and their shadowy cousins, the elite Delta Force. Under the insistent prodding of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Central Command’s Gen. Tommy Franks agreed to insert small teams of Green Berets and “D-Boys” to work with both the CIA and the tribal fighters. “The relationship between the CIA and the Special Forces has been the best I’ve seen since 1971,” says a retired three-star general who fought in Vietnam and now consults with the CIA.
Normally, the top brass scorns “going Hollywood”–any showy use of a too-lightly armed and equipped force. Tankers and artillerymen typically dominate the top ranks of the regular Army. They have little use for lightning raids by paratroopers or helicopter-borne commandos. Yet in Afghanistan, Central Command staged some “extremely gutsy” operations, says the retired three-star. Teams of no more than a dozen men set up mobile bases deep in the mountains and in the desert to rearm and refuel helicopters. To escape detection, the bases moved every four to six hours. The Afghanistan model–small teams of Special Forces, slipped behind enemy lines to target massive air power at the enemy–will be used again. But the Pentagon is perhaps still too wary of taking casualties. Some Special Forces operators say that there would be fewer friendly-fire casualties in Afghanistan if the military were willing to use slow, low-flying A-10s instead of high-altitude bombers.
The ghost of Hoover still haunts the FBI. The G-men no longer plant electronic bugs without permission of the courts or the Justice Department, nor do they spy on political organizations as they did in the days when Martin Luther King Jr. was smeared by the bureau as a communist stooge. But continually battered by the press and congressional investigations for a variety of missteps and cover-ups, the bureau can be as secretive as it ever was. The FBI has never liked to cooperate with the CIA, an institution it regards as a rival for power. The bureau and the agency have been repeatedly pushed to share and help each other in recent years. Yet according to one former senior national-security official, dealings between the FBI on one side and the CIA and other intelligence agencies on the other amounted to a “one-way street.” The CIA would regularly turn over detailed intelligence leads to the White House, Justice Department, FBI and other law enforcement. The FBI would sit on its raw information from informants and electronic eavesdropping. The failure of the FBI to share intelligence was a “massive problem,” according to a former official who dealt with terrorism issues in the Clinton administration.
Did the FBI blow a chance to head off September 11? Other government officials say that the FBI’s hang-ups about turning over raw information may well have hampered the U.S. intelligence community’s attempts to grapple with Al Qaeda. During the course of the investigation into the 1998 bombings of two U.S. Embassies in Africa, the FBI accumulated a treasure trove of leads. One of the FBI’s suspects, Wadih El-Hage, a former personal secretary to bin Laden, was something of a pack rat. He kept business cards from dozens of contacts he made while traveling on behalf of bin Laden’s corporate empire. Another suspect, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, an Iraqi later identified as a member of bin Laden’s inner circle, gave German interrogators a lengthy description of his contacts around the world. The diaries and business cards collected by El-Hage and Salim’s statements could have been used to create a road map of Al Qaeda’s network, say intelligence sources. Among the leads were names and addresses that could have pointed investigators to the terror cell run by Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11. But intelligence officials complain to NEWSWEEK that they received too little information, too late, from the FBI.
The FBI, like the CIA, has become a good deal less guarded and passive since 9-11. The FBI has always justified its secrecy by pointing to rules that restrict the disclosure of grand jury information. In the “Patriot Act” signed by the president in October, Congress changed those rules. Attorney General John Ashcroft, working with the new FBI director, Robert Mueller, has pushed the bureau to stage massive dragnets in order to try to disrupt terror cells before they can strike. Civil libertarians and some pundits complain that Ashcroft is heavy-handed. And some old FBI hands wonder if the bureau’s new strong-arm tactics will backfire by driving terrorists even deeper underground. Nonetheless, almost everyone agrees that the FBI’s more cooperative spirit is essential.
In a war that knows no borders, the United States is dependent on cooperating with foreign intelligence services as well. But here, too, history and culture can get in the way. In Germany, where the 9-11 plots were hatched, law enforcement is a loose patchwork. Fearful of creating another Gestapo, Hitler’s secret state police, the Germans after World War II sharply restricted information sharing between local investigators and national prosecutors. These well-intentioned safeguards may have stopped the Germans from connecting some key dots: Marienstrasse 54, the apartment shared by chief hijacker Mohamed Atta and several other plotters, was actually under surveillance by German authorities. But the investigation went nowhere, and the surveillance was dropped.
In France, a nation plagued for years by Islamic terror groups, police and prosecutors take a harder line. France was nearly crippled by terrorism during the revolt of its Algerian colony in the 1950s; today the overlapping French internal-security agencies are known to be ruthless. But the proud French have a well-deserved reputation among American soldiers and spies for being the most balky and ungrateful of allies. (In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle ordered all U.S. troops out of France. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk inquired, “Does that include the dead Americans in military cemeteries as well?”) Pentagon officials still seethe over France’s refusal to let American warplanes fly over its territory from Britain on their way to striking Libyan strongman Muammar Kaddafi’s personal compound in 1986.
In recent weeks, journalists have been compiling a rogues’ gallery of lawless states said to be prime havens for fleeing terrorists. Somalia is usually at the head of the list. The African nation plunged into chaos in the early ’90s, roiled by feuding clans. When American forces tried to support a U.N. relief effort by attempting to capture the most fearsome warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, a fire fight led to the deaths of 18 American servicemen. Recently a group of nine U.S. soldiers or operators–Special Forces or CIA, no one is sure which–was spotted conferring with tribal leaders in Somalia. The rumor mill suggested the spooks were an advance guard for some kind of military action against terrorist training camps that some faction leaders claim are run by local fundamentalist groups with ties to Al Qaeda. But those reports may have been exaggerated or at least premature.
It appears that the Somali government, such as it is, wants to cooperate with the United States, if only to avoid sharing the same fate as the Taliban. Last week Somali authorities reported the arrest of nine foreigners suspected of involvement in international terrorism. Hoping for U.S. backing–cash and weapons–some warlords are actively lobbying to become American surrogates in the war of terror. It may seem ironic, but in a region where irony has lost all meaning, it is perhaps predictable that one would-be American “client” is Hussein Aidid, a former U.S. Marine–who also happens to be the son of Mohammed Aidid, the warlord whom American Special Forces so disastrously chased back in 1993.
It has been suggested that a fleeing bin Laden might try to return to his tribal roots in Yemen, a desolate, violent land at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen has long been a terrorist sanctuary. It was the staging ground for the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, the American destroyer attacked by Al Qaeda in Aden Harbor in October 2000. Investigative sources have told NEWSWEEK that Qaeda operatives, including one of the September 11 hijackers, called a single telephone number in Yemen. The number was traced to a kind of terrorist logistics center that was used for the Cole and African embassy bombings. But the Yemeni government, with a wary eye on the U.S. smart bombs raining down on Afghanistan, has made clear that it would not welcome bin Laden. To show whose side it’s on, the Yemeni government last week sent tanks, soldiers and helicopter gunships to battle tribesmen who were reportedly harboring at least two terrorist fugitives. The fighting does illustrate how difficult it will be to root out the terrorists: 18 government soldiers died and the fugitives escaped.
America’s most problematic ally may be Pakistan. The Bush administration was relieved and grateful when Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, rallied to the anti-Qaeda cause back in September. In a country restless with Islamic fundamentalism, Musharraf was taking a personal risk. The Pakistani government also pleased its American allies by sending 4,000 troops to patrol the Afghan border, seeking to bottle up bin Laden and his fleeing supporters. But the troops were ill prepared, and the border stretches over 1,340 miles–about the distance from Maine to Florida. Pakistani helicopters don’t fly at night because, unlike American Special Forces, they have no night-vision capability, and because they’re afraid of getting shot down by locals armed with rocket-propelled grenades. Last week 48 Al Qaeda prisoners revolted and escaped; many were captured, but a handful of them vanished into the countryside. “It’s basically no man’s land” in the lawless tribal regions along the border, says one Pakistani official. The Pashtun tribesmen tend to be pro-Taliban and pro-Qaeda, though the prospect of a $25 million U.S. reward for information leading to the capture of bin Laden could test their tribal loyalties. If bin Laden slips into the crowded cities of Pakistan, he may remain elusive. There are still many supporters of the Taliban and bin Laden in Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI.
Last week Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz declared that any foreign authorities would be “out of their minds” to knowingly offer refuge to bin Laden. In Afghanistan, American forces and their Afghan allies have taken about 7,000 Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But that still leaves thousands of potential and actual terrorists trained in the dark arts by Al Qaeda’s camps. Most American intelligence officials simply assume that the terrorists will strike again, probably in the United States, although Europe is a potential target as well. On the weekend before Christmas, two F-15 fighters had to scramble to escort an American Airlines plane to Boston after a passenger tried to ignite explosives he had in his shoes, according to airline officials. (A U.S. law-enforcement source told NEWSWEEK that the explosives appeared to be C-4.) Flight attendants and other passengers subdued the attacker, who carried a British passport that appeared to be bogus.
The likelihood of a long-running war poses a dilemma for congressional lawmakers. After September 11, Hill leaders decided to hold off on the blame game. Too distracting, they said. But predictably, the pressure is growing for an investigation into what can only be called the most massive intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor. The House and Senate intelligence committees, which oversee the CIA, may soon hold hearings. But the House and Senate judiciary committees, which oversee the FBI, also want to get in the act–along with all the other committees that have jurisdiction over the alphabet soup of government investigative agencies.
Two well-respected lawmakers, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, want to set up a grander truth-finding commission, patterned after the investigations that followed Pearl Harbor and the John F. Kennedy assassination. The 14-member bipartisan panel would include no current government employees, only Wise Men–former high-ranking officials and possibly sages from the private sector or academe. “Americans will want to know what happened,” says McCain. “They’re not going to accept a ‘government’ explanation.” Maybe so, but it is going to be hard to keep politics out. As their press conference ended last week, McCain said, “I will hope that the commission will take a look and see how this would have been handled if Joe Lieberman were vice president.” Lieberman shot back. “Or if John McCain were president.” Let’s hope they were just kidding around.
