On a cold afternoon in the last days of Bill Clinton’s administration, Sandy Berger sat in his White House office with Condoleezza Rice, the woman who would soon be taking over his job as national security adviser. All that most Americans knew about Rice in December 2000 was that she was black as well as female. In Washington, however, she had a reputation as a patient and meticulous Kremlinologist; her friends knew she was also a superb classical pianist.
Berger glanced at her across the conference table in his office and gave a grim prediction that bore little relation to her skills: “Terrorism will consume far more of your time than you had ever imagined.”
He revealed that America was locked into a messy battle with an unstable but brilliant set of terrorists. It was an improvisational, deadly game. Her eyes dropped to a list of names. The first was Osama Bin Laden. Her job was to advise the new president, George W Bush, how to fight him.
There was little time to prepare, and Rice was almost alone. The dispute over the presidential election result in Florida had dragged on for six weeks, and most of Bush’s top advisers would not be selected, vetted and approved for months. Seeking more information, Rice sent for Dick Clarke, Clinton’s counterterrorism “czar”, to find out how the secret war against Bin Laden had gone so far.
Few in Washington had worked longer on counterterrorism than Clarke, and nobody at a more senior level. The son of a Boston chocolate factory worker, he had climbed to the elite of the American politico-military establishment by making himself indispensable to administrations since the Reagan era. He was a behind-the-scenes bruiser with many enemies, one of whom claimed he had survived by aping presidential sartorial styles and had even dyed his hair grey to match Clinton’s silver mane.
Nobody worked with more intensity. Clarke was the master of the nuts and bolts of counterterrorism, and his small staff saw themselves as defenders of the free world. All the same, he had a less than glorious tale to tell Rice of America’s failure to kill or capture Bin Laden.
Clarke’s own personality is a key factor in the story, but so is the lack of sustained attention from the Oval Office as rival agencies squabbled over how to deal with a foe who — they eventually discovered on September 11 last year — had America implacably in his sights.
Some of the details of this failure have already been reported. As Insight revealed two weeks ago, Clinton turned down at least three offers involving foreign governments to help to seize Bin Laden. America also failed to secure intelligence files on Bin Laden and his network offered by Sudan. It failed to get Saudi Arabia’s co-operation in the investigation into the deaths of 19 American servicemen in a truck bomb attack in Dhahran. And it failed to act on a warning of the bomb attack on the American embassy in Nairobi in 1998, which killed 213.
There was a great deal more to be embarrassed about in the unsuccessful secret war on Bin Laden, as Insight can now reveal.
Clinton’s initial response to the attack in Nairobi — and the simultaneous bombing of the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, — was to authorise Operation Infinite Reach, a retaliatory strike against Bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Clarke wanted much more. “He was after a comprehensive strike, one that would punish the Taliban for holding on to Bin Laden,” said one national security council insider. But Pentagon top brass were reluctant.
In the end a unanimous proposal came to Clinton from Berger, William Cohen, the defence secretary, and Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state. A missile strike on an Al-Qaeda meeting would attempt to kill Bin Laden, his top lieutenants and about 300 followers. Missiles would also target a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan where CIA intelligence appeared to indicate that Bin Laden was preparing chemical weapons.
The report from Afghanistan of the Al-Qaeda meeting was probably the best advance intelligence the American military has ever had on Bin Laden’s movements. But still the missiles missed; the terror leader had left hours earlier.
Worse, Clinton was accused of using the strikes to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky affair. Daniel Benjamin, one of Clarke’s staffers, says there was a loss of confidence inside the White House.
As Clinton’s interest faded, Clarke continued the secret war. He was at the height of his powers. His team of antiterrorism specialists — the inter-agency counterterrorism strategy group (CSG) — mapped out a plan to get Bin Laden and disrupt his emerging conspiracies through an ambitious covert war.
Around his oval wooden table in what used to be Colonel Oliver North’s office suite across from the White House, Clarke gathered America’s top terrorist fighters. Michael Sheehan, a former special forces commander who served as the State Department’s counterterrorism ambassador, and Cofer Black, a hulking man with slicked-back hair who led the CIA’s counterterrorism centre, were regulars at Clarke’s strategy sessions.
The Pentagon’s representative tended to rotate among top officers, indicating Cohen’s ambivalence about being sucked into a war on terrorism. According to one participant, “if they sent anyone under the rank of general, Clarke would throw them out. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he would say”.
The president wanted a continuing operation to find Bin Laden. In three memoranda of notification to the CIA, he had first authorised the killing of Bin Laden, then of several other senior Al-Qaeda leaders, and finally the shooting down of a private aeroplane that might contain Bin Laden. But when it came to actual operations, he was only prepared to authorise pin-prick cruise missile strikes that were focused on Bin Laden personally, not his organisation or the Taliban.
Two Los Angeles-class submarines were stationed permanently off the Pakistan coast, tracing giant arcs through the Indian Ocean as they waited to kill Bin Laden. Three times they received orders to prepare to launch. Hours of gruelling preparation followed, loading and arming missiles and synchronising the navigation controls. Each time, the strike was called off when the CIA cautioned that intelligence estimates of Bin Laden’s whereabouts weren’t sufficient.
Once, the CIA phoned the White House to report a camp in Afghanistan linked to Bin Laden where satellite photographs indicated a well-armed and equipped group were camped out in the desert, with some individuals appearing to be bodyguards for one central commander.
This was considered “all source intelligence” — leads were confirmed by satellite, telephone traffic and other methods. Clinton gave the order to prepare for a missile strike. Then, on closer inspection, the CIA analysts in Langley, Virginia, realised they were studying a wealthy sheikh from Dubai on a falconry expedition.
Two other false alarms — based on weak intelligence — rankled the navy: a planned attack on a tent in the Afghan desert and another on a compound of stone buildings believed to be an Al-Qaeda base. Analysts were unable to pinpoint Bin Laden in either place and the president called off the strikes.
The CIA was working with the military on preparations for a possible use of its secretive Delta Force. In a preparatory raid, operators from the CIA’s Special Activities Division flew in to an abandoned airfield near the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. They drew maps that planners would use to fortify its perimeter. The airfield could have been used as a forward base if an operation was launched to capture Bin Laden. But none was.
Intelligence agents were also air-dropped into territory controlled by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. The four-man team set up a listening post for the interception of Al-Qaeda communications and conducted a few days of training for Alliance personnel.
The training was almost worthless. “The briefing was conducted entirely in English,” said Haroun Amin, the Alliance’s ambassador in Washington.
The CIA managed to get an informant in Kandahar who had access to material at the Taliban’s internal security office. Sometimes this source passed on information on Bin Laden’s travels inside Afghanistan. But the information took too long to reach America’s decision makers, who needed at least six hours’ advance notice to launch a missile strike.
The Pentagon, headed by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Hugh Shelton, repeatedly resisted dispatching special forces into Afghanistan. Clarke and the national security council wanted a small operation — what army officials call “going Hollywood”. Shelton and other defence officials cleverly resisted by asking leading questions of national security council staffers, who generally lacked military experience. What if a plane or helicopter malfunctions, don’t you want a search-and-rescue team? And don’t those rescue teams need carriers to take off from? And those carriers can’t linger off the coast of Pakistan without giving away the game, can they? Shelton showed he needed a cast of thousands to mount a proper operation and the sheer scale of such a venture deterred presidential approval. Clarke, according to his associates, concluded that the Pentagon was gun shy. “He basically told the Pentagon they were cowards, and that didn’t go down too well,” said one national security council staffer.
Another senior Clinton official said Clarke’s criticisms were justified. “The Pentagon did nothing. They were paralysed by fear that something might go wrong like it did in Somalia. ‘Gun shy’ is not putting it hard enough.”
Behind the scenes, Clarke was slowly trying to stiffen the administration’s spine — and hunting for new options. To demonstrate America’s vulnerability, he organised a group of government-paid hackers to break into the Pentagon’s most secure computer systems in 1998. They gained control of the nation’s military command centre systems — the very ones to be used to defend America during an attack. It took only three days and a batch of off-the-shelf PCs.
By the spring of 2000, the navy was weary of maintaining a submarine presence off Pakistan ready for a strike that was never ordered. They wanted a real plan or a ticket home. Clinton, now in the last year of his presidency, called Berger into the Oval Office.
“What else can we do to get Bin Laden? We’ve got to think of something new,” he said. Berger passed the word to Clarke, who quickly convened his group to look for a solution.
As always, their brainstorming sessions were conducted in Clarke’s office, over burgers and tuna sandwiches sent over from the White House canteen. Clustered around Clarke’s whiteboard, the men drew up a shortlist of solutions to the Bin Laden problem. Albright used to refer to it as “Where’s Waldo?” after a children’s game.
Finally, Clarke came up with a solution: the Predator, the military’s revolutionary unmanned plane. It would find Bin Laden. One participant said: “Dick loves technology. He was always asking what else can we do? What can be done next? He was saying, ‘Why can’t we do something?’ He kept thinking about technology and asking what can we do that’s practical. How can we get it together? We were drawing up the options on the board and that’s how the Predator idea came up.”
Until the spring of 2000, the Predator was not considered as more than a tactical eye in the sky. It had been used widely in the Kosovo war to spot troop movements, with great success. But, particularly given the ease by which it could be shot down or crash, its use had been confined to military tactical support, not as a covert intelligence asset. Clarke, however, saw its value in the war against terrorism.
According to one participant in the discussions: “The Predator itself was not new, but what was coming together at this time was an incredible improvement in video technology. You could see with incredible precision what was happening on the ground while the Predator itself could, with luck, remain completely unnoticed.”
The group worked together with the CIA and the air force to set up a trial of the technology. General Anthony Zinni, head of US central command, which covers south Asia, had a close military-to-military relationship with the Uzbekistan government and, according to one source, it was persuaded to accept a secret airbase from which Predator missions could be flown.
By September 2000, after long bureaucratic delays, the project was up and running in a trial phase. The results were remarkable. As the Predator flew over Afghanistan, Clarke could watch the street bazaars of Kandahar and the terrorist camps around the town of Khost on a colour screen in Langley.
It would be daytime in Afghanistan but still dark in America. At 2am or 3am Clarke used to phone colleagues and ask if they wanted to come out and watch the action. Most were content with viewing the videos the following day. Clarke would show Berger and sometimes the president pictures from the missions.
One video showed a tall man in flowing robes moving through Kandahar. He was clearly seen with a small security detail that moved ahead of him, securing the street. “We were convinced it was him, Bin Laden himself,” said one participant in the operation. Once again, however, Clinton did not authorise a strike: the analysts could not provide 100% certainty it was Bin Laden, and the military reaction time was too slow.
All the same, Clarke and his team were convinced that they would finally get the chance to kill Bin Laden in real time: to watch him on the screen while submarine-launched missiles were cruising across the desert to wipe him out.
In early October the Predator crashed. By official accounts the project was called off because of the crash, but insiders reveal it was only half the story.
The project was getting controversial. With Washington in full presidential election fever, it was bureaucratic infighting that finally shut down the Bin Laden hunt. The CIA was getting restless at Clarke’s ceaseless demands, and Cofer Black’s relations with Clarke were turning sour.
“He was under pressure back at Langley, and Clarke saw this as Black becoming unnecessarily bureaucratic, of failing to support an unconventional approach. But Clarke’s real beef was Jim Pavitt (the CIA’s director of operations and Black’s boss) who Clarke thought was the one blocking things,” said one of those who witnessed their squabbles.
The CIA and the air force were telling Clarke there were operational reasons why the Predator programme had to shut down, but Clarke wasn’t buying it. He knew there were other Predators available. “You’re telling me it won’t work. The real reason is that you don’t want to do it!” shouted Clarke.
There was a dispute between the CIA and the air force over who should pay for the Predator. Simmering behind their budgetary concerns was growing resentment of how Clarke was calling the shots from the White House — exercising the sort of operational command, some suggested, that Olly North once had, and doing what Clinton had promised Congress that Clarke would not do when he was made counterterrorism co-ordinator.
“Basically, because there was no money specifically appropriated (allocated by Congress) for this project — and even if it was only a couple of million dollars — there was a hell of a fight over who should pay,” said one senior White House official.
So the Predator vanished from Afghanistan’s skies and Bin Laden disappeared from view. The Predator would not return until after September 11, 2001.
