 Chapter 4.2 of the 9-11 Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 4.2. Crisis, August 1998. On August 7, 1998, National Security Advisor Berger woke President Clinton with a phone call at 5.35 a.m. to tell him of the almost simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Suspicion quickly focused on bin Laden. Unusually good intelligence, chiefly from the year-long monitoring of Al Qaeda's cell in Nairobi, soon firmly fixed responsibility on him and his associates. Debate about what to do settled very soon on one option, Tamahak cruise missiles. Months earlier, after cancellation of the covert capture operation, Clark had prodded the Pentagon to explore possibilities for military action. On June 2, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directed General Zinni at Central Command to develop a plan which he had submitted during the first week of July. Zinni's planner surely considered the two previous times the United States had used force to respond to terrorism. The 1986 strike on Libya and the 1993 strike against Iraq. They proposed firing Tamahogs against eight terrorist camps in Afghanistan, including bin Laden's compound at Tarnac Farms. After the embassy attacks, the Pentagon offered this plan to the White House. The day after the embassy bombings, Tenet brought to a principles meeting intelligence that terrorist leaders were expected to gather at a camp near coast Afghanistan to plan future attacks. According to Berger, Tenet said that several hundred would attend, including bin Laden. The CIA described the area as effectively a military cantonment away from civilian population centers and overwhelmingly populated by jihadists. Clark remembered sitting next to Tenet in a White House meeting, asking Tenet, you thinking what I'm thinking and his nodding, yes. The principles quickly reached a consensus on attacking the gathering. The strike's purpose was to kill bin Laden and his chief lieutenants. Berger put in place a tightly compartmented process designed to keep all planning secret. On August 11, General Zinni received orders to prepare detailed plans for strikes against the sites in Afghanistan. The Pentagon briefed President Clinton about these plans on August 12 and 14. Though the principles hoped that the missiles would hit bin Laden, NSC staff recommended the strike whether or not there was firm evidence that the commanders were at the facilities. Considerable debate went to the question of whether to strike targets outside of Afghanistan, including two facilities in Sudan. One was a tannery believed to belong to bin Laden. The other was al-Shifa, a cartoon pharmaceutical plant which Intelligence Reports said was manufacturing a precursor ingredient for nerve gas with bin Laden's financial support. The argument for hitting the tannery was that it could hurt bin Laden financially. The argument for hitting al-Shifa was that it would lessen the chance of bin Laden's having nerve gas for a later attack. Ever since March 1995, American officials had had in the backs of their minds al-Shinrikyo's release of sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. President Clinton himself had expressed great concern about chemical and biological terrorism in the United States. Bin Laden had reportedly been heard to speak of wanting a Hiroshima and at least 10,000 casualties. The CIA reported that a soil sample from the vicinity of the al-Shifa plant had tested positive for EMPTA, a precursor chemical for VX, a nerve gas whose lone use was for mass killing. Two days before the embassy bombings, Clark staff wrote that bin Laden had invested in and almost certainly has access to VX produced at a plant in Sudan. Senior State Department officials believed that they had received a similar verdict independently, though they and Clark staff were probably relying on the same report. Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director responsible for intelligence programs, initially cautioned Berger that the bottom line was that we will need much better intelligence on this facility before we seriously consider any options. She added that the link between bin Laden and al-Shifa was rather uncertain at this point. Berger has told us that he thought about what might happen if the decision went against hitting al-Shifa and nerve gas was used in a New York subway two weeks later. By the early hours of the morning of August 20, President Clinton and all his principal advisors had agreed to strike bin Laden camps in Afghanistan near coast, as well as hitting al-Shifa. The President took the Sudanese tannery off the target list because he saw little point in killing uninvolved people without doing significant harm to bin Laden. The principal, with the most qualms regarding al-Shifa, was Attorney General Reno. She expressed concern about attacking two Muslim countries at the same time. Looking back, she said that she felt the premise kept shifting. Later on August 20, Navy vessels in the Arabian Sea fired their cruise missiles. Though most of them hit their intended targets, neither bin Laden nor any terrorist leader was killed. Berger told us that an after-action review by Director Tennant concluded that the strikes had killed 20 to 30 people in the camps, but probably missed bin Laden by a few hours. Since the missiles headed for Afghanistan had had to cross Pakistan, the Vice-Chairman of Joint Chiefs was sent to meet with Pakistan's Army Chief of Staff to ensure him the missiles were not coming from India. Officials in Washington speculated that one or another Pakistani official might have sent a warning to the Taliban or bin Laden. The airstrikes marked the climax of an intense 48-hour period in which Berger notified congressional leaders, the principals called their foreign counterparts, and President Clinton flew back from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard to address the nation from the Oval Office. The president spoke to the congressional leadership from Air Force One, and he called British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from the White House. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott initially supported the president. The next month, Gingrich's office dismissed the cruise missile attacks as pinpricks. At the time President Clinton was embroiled in the Lewinsky scandal which continued to consume public attention for the rest of that year and the first months of 1999. As it happened, a popular 1997 movie, Wag the Dog, features a president who fakes a war to distract public attention from a domestic scandal. Some Republicans in Congress raised questions about the timing of the strikes. Berger was particularly rankled by an editorial in The Economist that said that only the future would tell whether the U.S. missile strikes had created 10,000 new fanatics where there would have been none. Much public commentary turned immediately to scouting criticism that the action was too aggressive. The Sudanese denied that Al-Shifa produced nerve gas and they allowed journalists to visit what was left of a seemingly harmless facility. President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Berger, Tenet, and Clark insisted to us that their judgment was right pointing to the soil sample evidence. No independent evidence has emerged to corroborate the CIA's assessment. Everyone involved in the decision had, of course, been aware of President Clinton's problems. He told them to ignore them. Berger recalled the president saying to him that they were going to get crap either way so they should do the right thing. All his aides testified to us that they based their advice solely on national security considerations. We have found no reason to question their statements. The failure of the strikes, the wag the dog slur, the intense partisanship of the period, and the nature of the Al-Shifa evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against bin Laden. Berger told us that he did not feel any sense of constraint. The period after the August 1998 Embassy bombings was critical in shaping U.S. policy toward bin Laden. Although more Americans had been killed in the 1996 Kobar Towers attack, and many more in Beirut in 1983, the overall loss of life rivaled the worst attacks in memory. More ominous, perhaps, was the demonstration of an operational capability to coordinate two nearly simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in different countries. Despite the availability of information that Al-Qaeda was a global network in 1998, policymakers knew little about the organization. The reams of new information that the CIA's bin Laden unit had been developing since 1996 had not been pulled together and synthesized for the rest of the government. Indeed, analysts in the unit felt that they were viewed as alarmists even within the CIA. A national intelligence estimate on terrorism in 1997 had only briefly mentioned bin Laden, and no subsequent national estimate would authoritatively evaluate the terrorism danger until after 9-11. Policymakers knew there was a dangerous individual, Osama bin Laden, whom they had been trying to capture and bring to trial. Documents at the time referred to bin Laden and his associates, or bin Laden and his network. They did not emphasize the existence of a structured worldwide organization gearing up to train thousands of potential terrorists. In the critical days and weeks after the August 1998 attacks, senior policymakers in the Clinton administration had to reevaluate the threat posed by bin Laden. Was this just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with for decades, or was it radically new, posing a danger beyond any yet experienced? Even after the embassy attacks, bin Laden had been responsible for the deaths of fewer than 50 Americans, most of them overseas. An NSC staffer working for Richard Clark told us the threat was seen as one that could cause hundreds of casualties, not thousands. Even officials who acknowledge a vital threat intellectually may not be ready to act on such beliefs at great cost or at high risk. Therefore, the government experts who believed that bin Laden and his network posed such a novel danger needed a way to win broad support for their views, or at least spotlight the areas of dispute. The presidential daily brief and the similar, more widely circulated daily reports for high officials, consisting mainly of brief reports of intelligence news without much analysis or context, did not provide such a vehicle. The National Intelligence Estimate has often played this role, and is sometimes controversial for this very reason. It played no role in judging the threat posed by al-Qaeda, either in 1998 or later. In the late summer and fall of 1998, the US government also was worrying about the deployment of military power in two other ongoing conflicts. After years of war in the Balkans, the United States had finally committed itself to significant military intervention in 1995-1996. Already maintaining a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia, US officials were beginning to consider major combat operations against Serbia to protect Muslim civilians in Kosovo from ethnic cleansing. Air strikes were threatened in October 1998. A full-scale NATO bombing campaign against Serbia was launched in March 1999. In addition, the Clinton administration was facing the possibility of major combat operations against Iraq. Since 1996, the UN inspections regime had been increasingly obstructed by Saddam Hussein. The United States was threatening to attack unless unfettered inspections could resume. The Clinton administration eventually launched a large-scale set of airstrikes against Iraq. Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. These military commitments became the context in which the Clinton administration had to consider opening another front of military engagement against a new terrorist threat based in Afghanistan. A follow-on campaign. Clark hoped the August 1998 missile strikes would mark the beginning of a sustained campaign against Bin Laden. Clark was, as he later admitted, obsessed with Bin Laden, and the embassy bombings gave him new scope for pursuing his obsession. Terrorism had moved high up among the president's concerns, and Clark's position had elevated accordingly. The CSG, unlike most standing interagency committees, did not have to report through the deputy's committee. Although such a reporting relationship had been prescribed in the May 1998 presidential directive, after expressions of concern by Attorney General Reno, among others, that directive contained an exception that permitted the CSG to report directly to the principals if Berger so elected. In practice, the CSG often reported not even to the full principal's committee, but instead to the so-called small group formed by Berger, consisting only of those principals cleared to know about the most sensitive issues connected with counter-terrorism activities concerning Bin Laden or the Cobar Towers investigation. For this inner cabinet, Clark drew up what he called political military plan delenda. The Latin delenda, meaning that something must be destroyed, evoked the famous Roman vow to destroy its rival, cartage. The overall goal of Clark's paper was to immediately eliminate any significant threat to Americans from the Bin Laden network. The paper called for diplomacy to deny Bin Laden sanctuary, covert action to disrupt terrorist activities, but above all to capture Bin Laden and his deputies and bring them to trial, efforts to dry up Bin Laden's money supply, and preparation for follow-on military action. The status of the document was and remained uncertain. It was never formally adopted by the principals, and participants in the small group now have little or no recollection of it. It did, however, guide Clark's efforts. The military component of Clark's plan was its most fully articulated element. He envisioned an ongoing campaign of strikes against Bin Laden's bases in Afghanistan or elsewhere whenever target information was ripe. Acknowledging that individual targets might not have much value, he cautioned Berger not to expect ever again to have an assembly of terrorist leaders in his sights. But he argued that rolling attacks might persuade the Taliban to hand over Bin Laden, and in any case would show that the action in August was not a one-off event. It would show that the United States was committed to a relentless effort to take down Bin Laden's network. Members of the small group found themselves unpersuaded of the merits of rolling attacks. Defense Secretary William Cohen told us Bin Laden's training camps were primitive, built with rope ladders. General Shelton called them jungle gym camps. Neither thought them worthwhile targets for very expensive missiles. President Clinton and Berger also worried about the economist's point that attacks that missed Bin Laden could enhance his stature and win him new recruits. After the United States launched air attacks against Iraq at the end of 1998 and against Serbia in 1999, in each case provoking worldwide criticism, Deputy National Security Advisor James Steinberg added the argument that attacks in Afghanistan offered little benefit, lots of blowback against a bomb happy U.S. During the last week of August 1998, officials began considering possible follow-on strikes. According to Clark, President Clinton was inclined to launch further strikes sooner rather than later. On August 27, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Walter Slocum advised Secretary Cohen that the available targets were not promising. The experience of the previous week, he wrote, has only confirmed the importance of defining a clearly articulated rationale for military action that was effective as well as justified. But Slocum worried that simply striking some of these available targets did not add up to an effective strategy. Defense officials at a lower level, in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, tried to meet Slocum's objections. They developed a plan that, unlike Clark's, called not for particular strikes, but instead for a broad change in national strategy and in the institutional approach of the Department of Defense, implying a possible need for large-scale operations across the whole spectrum of U.S. military capabilities. It urged the Department to become a lead agency in driving a national counterterrorism strategy forward to champion a national effort to take up the gauntlet that international terrorists have thrown at our feet. The authors expressed concern that we have not fundamentally altered our philosophy or our approach, even though the terrorist threat had grown. They outlined an eight-part strategy to be more proactive and aggressive. The future, they warned, might bring horrific attacks, in which case we will have no choice, nor, unfortunately, will we have a plan. The Assistant Secretary, Alan Holmes, took the paper to Slocum's Chief Deputy, Jan Lodol, but it went no further. Its lead author recalls being told by Holmes that Lodol thought it was too aggressive. Holmes cannot recall what was said, and Lodol cannot remember the episode or the paper at all. End of Chapter 4.2 Chapter 4.3 of the 9-11 Commission Report This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report Chapter 4.3 Diplomacy After the August missile strikes, diplomatic options to press the Taliban seemed no more promising than military options. The United States had issued a formal warning to the Taliban, and also to Sudan, that they would be held directly responsible for any attacks on Americans wherever they occurred, carried out by the bin Laden network as long as they continued to provide sanctuary to it. For a brief moment it had seemed as if the August strikes might have shocked the Taliban into thinking of giving up bin Laden. On August 22, the reclusive Mullah Omar told a working-level State Department official that the strikes were counterproductive, but added that he would be open to a dialogue within the United States on bin Laden's presence in Afghanistan. Meeting in Islamabad with William Milam, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Taliban delegates said it was against their culture to expel someone seeking sanctuary, but asked what would happen to bin Laden should he be sent to Saudi Arabia. Yet in September 1998, when the Saudi emissary Prince Turkey asked Mullah Omar whether he would keep his earlier promise to expel bin Laden, the Taliban leader said no. Both sides shouted at each other with Mullah Omar denouncing the Saudi government. Riyadh then suspended its diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates were the only countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Crown Prince Abdullah told President Clinton and Vice President Gore about this when he visited Washington in late September. His account confirmed reports that the US government had received independently. Other efforts with the Saudi government centered on improving intelligence sharing and permitting US agents to interrogate prisoners in Saudi custody. The history of such cooperation in 1997 and 1998 had been strained. Several officials told us, in particular, that the United States could not get direct access to an important al-Qaeda financial official, Madani Altaib, who had been detained by the Saudi government in 1997. Though US officials repeatedly raised the issue, the Saudis provided limited information. In his September 1998 meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah, Vice President Gore, while thanking the Saudi government for their responsiveness, renewed the request for direct US access to Ta'ib. The United States never obtained this access. An NSC staff-led working group on terrorist finances asked the CIA in November 1998 to push again for access to Ta'ib and to see if it is possible to elaborate further on the ties between Osama bin Laden and prominent individuals in Saudi Arabia, including especially the bin Laden family. One result was two NSC-lit interagency trips to Persian Gulf states in 1999 and 2000. During these trips, the NSC Treasury and Intelligence representatives spoke with Saudi officials and later interviewed members of the bin Laden family about Osama's inheritance. The Saudis and the bin Laden family eventually helped in this particular effort, and US officials ultimately learned that bin Laden was not financing al-Qaeda out of a personal inheritance. But clock was frustrated about how little the agency knew, complaining to Berger that four years after we first asked CIA to track down bin Laden's finances and two years after the creation of the CIA's bin Laden unit, the agencies said it could only guess at how much aid bin Laden gave to terrorist groups, what were the main sources of his budget, and how he moved his money. The other diplomatic route to get at bin Laden in Afghanistan ran through Islamabad. In the summer before the embassy bombings, the State Department had been heavily focused on rising tensions between India and Pakistan, and did not aggressively challenge Pakistan on Afghanistan and bin Laden. But State Department counterterrorism officials wanted a stronger position. The Department's acting counterterrorism coordinator advised Secretary Albright to designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, noting that despite high-level Pakistani assurances, the country's military intelligence service continued activities in support of international terrorism by supporting attacks on civilian targets in Kashmir. This recommendation was opposed by the State Department's South Asia Bureau, which was concerned that it would damage already sensitive relations with Pakistan in the wake of the May 1998 nuclear tests by both Pakistan and India. Secretary Albright rejected the recommendation on August 5, 1998, just two days before the embassy bombings. She told us that, in general, putting the Pakistanis on the terrorists list would eliminate any influence the United States had over them. In October, an NSC counterterrorism official noted that Pakistan's pro-Taliban military intelligence service had been training Kashmiri jihadists in one of the camps hit by US missiles, leading to the death of Pakistanis. After flying to Nairobi and bringing home the coffins of the American dead, Secretary Albright increased the Department's focus on counterterrorism. According to Ambassador Mylam, the bombings were a wake-up call, and he soon found himself spending 45 to 50% of his time working the Taliban bin Laden portfolio. But Pakistan's military intelligence service, known as the ISID, Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, was the Taliban's primary patron, which made progress difficult. Additional pressure on the Pakistanis beyond demands to press the Taliban on bin Laden seemed unattractive to most officials of the State Department. Congressional sanctions punishing Pakistan for possessing nuclear arms prevented the administration from offering incentives to Islamabad. In the words of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, Washington's Pakistan policy was stick-heavy. Talbot felt that the only remaining sticks were additional sanctions that would have bankrupted the Pakistanis, a dangerous move that could have brought total chaos to a nuclear-armed country with a significant number of Islamic radicals. The Saudi government, which had a long and close relationship with Pakistan and provided it oil on generous terms, was already pressing Sharif with regard to the Taliban and bin Laden. A senior State Department official concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah put a tremendous amount of heat on the Pakistani Prime Minister during the Prince's October 1998 visit to Pakistan. The State Department urged President Clinton to engage the Pakistanis. Accepting this advice, President Clinton invited Sharif to Washington, where they talked mostly about India but also discussed bin Laden. After Sharif went home, the President called him and raised the bin Laden subject again. This effort elicited from Sharif a promise to talk with the Taliban. Mullah Omar's position showed no sign of softening. One intelligence report passed to Berger by the NSC staff quoted bin Laden as saying that Mullah Omar had given him a completely free hand to act in any country, though asking that he did not claim responsibility for attacks in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was described as grabbing his beard and saying emotionally, by Allah, by God, the Americans will still be amazed. The so-called United States will suffer the same fate as the Russians. Their state will collapse too. Debate in the State Department intensified after December 1998 when Michael Sheehan became counter-terrorism coordinator. A one-time Special Forces officer, he had worked with Albright when she was ambassador to the United Nations and had served on the NSC staff with Clark. He shared Clark's obsession with terrorism and had little hesitation about locking horns with the regional bureaus. Through every available channel, he repeated the earlier warning to the Taliban of the possible dire consequences, including military strikes, if bin Laden remained their guest and conducted additional attacks. Within the Department, he argued for designating the Taliban regime a state sponsor of terrorism. This was technically difficult to do for calling it a state would be tantamount to diplomatic recognition, which the United States had thus far withheld. But Sheehan urged the use of any available weapon against the Taliban. He told us that he thought he was regarded in the Department as a one-note Johnny nutcase. In early 1999, the State Department's Counter-terrorism Office proposed a comprehensive diplomatic strategy for all states involved in the Afghanistan problem, including Pakistan. It specified both carrots and hard-hitting sticks, among them certifying Pakistan as uncooperative on terrorism. Albright said the original carrot sticks listed in a decision paper for principles may not have been used as described on paper, but added that they were used in other ways or in varying degrees. But the paper's author, Ambassador Sheehan, was frustrated and complained to us that the original plan had been watered down to the point that nothing was then done with it. The cautiousness of the South Asia Bureau was reinforced when, in May 1999, Pakistani troops were discovered to have infiltrated into an especially mountainous area of Kashmir. A limited war began between India and Pakistan, euphemistically called the Kargil Crisis, as India tried to drive the Pakistani forces out. Patience with Pakistan was wearing thin inside both the State Department and the NSC. Bruce Rydell, the NSC staff member responsible for Pakistan, wrote Burger that Islamabad was behaving as a rogue state in two areas, backing Taliban, UBL terror, and provoking war with India. Discussion within the Clinton administration on Afghanistan then concentrated on two main alternatives. The first, championed by Rydell and Assistant Secretary of State, Carl Inderforth, was to undertake a major diplomatic effort to end the Afghan Civil War and install a national unity government. The second, favored by Sheehan, Clark, and the CIA, called for labeling the Taliban a terrorist group and ultimately funneling secret aid to its chief foe, the Northern Alliance. This dispute would go back and forth throughout 1999 and ultimately become entangled with a debate about enlisting the Northern Alliance as an ally for covert action. Another diplomatic option may have been available, nurturing Afghan exile groups as a possible moderate governing alternative to the Taliban. In late 1999, Washington provided some support for talks among the leaders of exile Afghan groups, including the ousted, Rome-based King Zaire Shah and Amid Karzai, about bolstering anti-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan and linking the Northern Alliance with Pashtun groups. One U.S. diplomat later told us that the exile groups were not ready to move forward and that coordinating fractious groups presiding in Bonn, Rome, and Cyprus proved extremely difficult. Frustrated by the Taliban's resistance, two senior State Department officials suggested asking the Saudis to offer the Taliban $250 million for bin Laden. Clark opposed having the United States facilitate a huge grant to a regime as heinous as the Taliban, and that the idea might not seem attractive to either Secretary Albright or First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, both critics of the Taliban's record on women's rights. The proposal seems to have quietly died. Within the State Department, some officials delayed Shehan and Clark's push either to designate Taliban-controlled Afghanistan as a state sponsor of terrorism, or to designate the regime as a foreign terrorist organization, thereby avoiding the issue of whether to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's government. Shehan and Clark prevailed in July 1999, when President Clinton issued an executive order effectively declaring the Taliban regime a state sponsor of terrorism. In October, a U.N. Security Council resolution, championed by the United States, added economic and travel sanctions. With U.N. sanctions set to come into effect in November, Clark wrote Burger that the Taliban appeared to be up to something. Mullah Omar had shoveled his cabinet and hinted at bin Laden's possible departure. Clark's staff thought his most likely destination would be Somalia. Chesnia seemed less appealing with Russia on the offensive. Clark commented that Iraq and Libya had previously discussed hosting bin Laden, though he and his staff had their doubts that bin Laden would trust secular Arab dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi. Clark also raised the remote possibility of Yemen, which offered vast uncontrolled spaces. In November, the CSG discussed whether the sanctions had rattled the Taliban, who seemed to be looking for a face-saving way out of the bin Laden issue. In fact, none of the outside pressure had any visible effect on Mullah Omar, who was unconcerned about commerce with the outside world. Omar had virtually no diplomatic contact with the West since he refused to meet with non-Muslims. The United States learned that at the end of 1999, the Taliban Council of Ministers unanimously reaffirmed that their regime would stick by bin Laden. Relations between bin Laden and the Taliban leadership were sometimes tense, but the foundation was deep and personal. Indeed, Mullah Omar had executed at least one subordinate who opposed his pro-bin Laden policy. The United States would try tougher sanctions in 2000. Working with Russia, a country involved in an ongoing campaign against Chechen separatists, some of whom received support from bin Laden, the United States persuaded the United Nations to adopt Security Council Resolution 1333, which included an embargo on arms shipments to the Taliban in December 2000. The aim of the resolution was to hit the Taliban where it was most sensitive on the battlefield against the Northern Alliance, and criminalize giving them arms and providing military advisors, which Pakistan had been doing. Yet the passage of the resolution had no visible effect on Omar, nor did it halt the flow of Pakistani military assistance to the Taliban. U.S. authorities had continued to try to get cooperation from Pakistan in pressing the Taliban to stop sheltering bin Laden. President Clinton contacted Sharif again in June 1999, partly to discuss the crisis with India, but also to urge Sharif in the strongest way I can to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden. The President suggested that Pakistan use its control over oil supplies to the Taliban and over Afghan imports through Karachi. Sharif suggested instead that Pakistani forces might try to capture bin Laden themselves. Though no one in Washington thought this was likely to happen, President Clinton gave the idea his blessing. The President met with Sharif in Washington in early July, though the meeting's main purpose was to seal the Pakistani Prime Minister's decision to withdraw from the Kargil confrontation in Kashmir. President Clinton complained about Pakistan's failure to take effective action with respect to the Taliban and bin Laden. Sharif came back to his earlier proposal and won approval for U.S. assistance in training a Pakistani special forces team for an operation against bin Laden. Then in October 1999, Sharif was deposed by General Pervez Musharraf and the plan was terminated. At first, the Clinton administration hoped that Musharraf's coup might create an opening for action on bin Laden. A career military officer, Musharraf was thought to have the political strength to confront and influence the Pakistani military intelligence service, which supported the Taliban. Berger speculated that the new government might use bin Laden to buy concessions from Washington, but neither side ever developed such an initiative. By late 1999, more than a year after the embassy bombings, diplomacy with Pakistan, like the efforts with the Taliban, had, according to Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, born little fruit. End of Chapter 4.3 Chapter 4.4 of the 9-11 Commission Report This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 4.4. Covert Action As part of the response to the embassy bombings, President Clinton signed a memorandum of notification authorizing the CIA to let its tribal assets use force to capture bin Laden and his associates. CIA officers told the tribals that the plan to capture bin Laden, which had been turned off three months earlier, was back on. The memorandum also authorized the CIA to attack bin Laden in other ways. Also, an executive order froze financial holdings that could be linked to bin Laden. The counter-terrorism staff at CIA thought it was gaining a better understanding of bin Laden and his network. In preparation for briefing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 2, Tenet was told that the intelligence community knew more about bin Laden's network than about any other top-tier terrorist organization. The CIA was using this knowledge to disrupt a number of bin Laden-associated cells. Working with Albanian authorities, CIA operatives had raided an al-Qaeda forgery operation and another terrorist cell in Tehran. These operations may have disrupted a plant attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and did lead to the rendition of a number of al-Qaeda-related terrorist operatives. After the embassy bombings, there were arrests in Azerbaijan, Italy, and Britain. Several terrorists were sent to an Arab country. The CIA described working with FBI operatives to prevent a plant attack on the U.S. embassy in Uganda and a number of suspects were arrested. On September 16, Abu Hajer, one of bin Laden's deputies in Sudan and the head of his computer operations and weapons procurement, was arrested in Germany. He was the most important bin Laden lieutenant captured thus far. Clark commented to Berger with satisfaction that August and September had brought the greatest number of terrorist arrests in a short period of time that we have ever arranged slash facilitated. Given the President's August memorandum of notification, the CIA had already been working on new plans for using the Afghan Tribals to capture bin Laden. During September and October, the Tribals claimed to have tried at least four times to ambush bin Laden. Senior CIA officials doubted whether any of these ambush attempts had actually occurred, but the Tribals did seem to have success in reporting where bin Laden was. This information was more useful than it had been in the past. Since the August missile strikes, bin Laden had taken to moving his sleeping place frequently and unpredictably and had added new bodyguards. Worst of all, al-Qaeda senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times. This made it much more difficult for the National Security Agency to intercept his conversations. But since the Tribals seemed to know where bin Laden was or would be, an alternative to capturing bin Laden would be to mark his location and call in another round of missile strikes. On November 3, the small group met to discuss these problems, among other topics. Preparing Director Tenet for a small group meeting in mid-November, the counter-terrorist center stressed, at this point we cannot predict when or if a capture operation will be executed by our assets. U.S. counter-terrorism officials also worried about possible domestic attacks. Several intelligence reports, some of dubious sourcing, mentioned Washington as a possible target. On October 26, Clark's CSG took the unusual step of holding a meeting dedicated to trying to evaluate the threat of a terrorist attack in the United States by the Osama bin Laden network. The CSG members were urged to be as creative as possible in their thinking about preventing a bin Laden attack on U.S. territory. Participants noted that while the FBI had been given additional resources for such efforts, both IT and the CIA were having problems exploiting leads by tracing U.S. telephone numbers and translating documents obtained in cell disruptions abroad. The Justice Department reported that the current guidelines from the Attorney General gave sufficient legal authority for domestic investigation and surveillance. Though intelligence gave no clear indication of what might be afoot, some intelligence reports mentioned chemical weapons pointing toward work at a camp in southern Afghanistan called Darunta. On November 4, 1998, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed its indictment of bin Laden, charging him with conspiracy to attack U.S. defense installations. The indictment also charged that al-Qaeda had allied itself with Sudan, Iran, and Hezbollah. The original sealed indictment had added that al-Qaeda had reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaeda would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq. This passage led Clark, who for years had read intelligence reports on Iraq's Sudanese cooperation on chemical weapons, to speculate to Berger that a large Iraqi presence at chemical facilities in Khartoum was probably a direct result of the Iraq-Al-Qaeda agreement. Clark added that VX precursor traces found near Al-Shifa were the exact formula used by Iraq. This language about al-Qaeda's understanding with Iraq had been dropped, however, when a superseding indictment was filed in November 1998. On Friday, December 4, 1998, the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily Brief describing intelligence received from a friendly government about a threatened hijacking in the United States. This article was declassified at our request. The following is the text of an item from the Presidential Daily Brief received by President William J. Clinton on December 4, 1998. Redacted material is indicated in brackets and read as blank. Subject, bin Laden preparing to hijack U.S. aircraft and other attacks. One, reporting blank, suggests bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attacks in the U.S., including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shahiq Umar Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Mohamed Sadik Aouda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gamma At-Al-Islamiyah, IG, saying that, as of late October, the IG had completed planning for an operation in the U.S. on behalf of bin Laden, but that the operation was on hold. A senior bin Laden operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the U.S. soon thereafter to discuss options, perhaps including an aircraft hijacking. IG leader Islam Bouli in late September was planning to hijack a U.S. airliner during the, quote, next couple of weeks, end quote, to free Abd al-Rahman and the other prisoners according to what may be a different source. The same source late last month said that bin Laden might implement plans to hijack U.S. aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport, blank. Two, some members of the bin Laden network have received hijack training, according to various sources, but no group directly tied to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization has ever carried out an aircraft hijacking. Bin Laden could be weighing other types of operations against U.S. aircraft. According to blank, the IG in October obtained SA-7 missiles and intended to move them from Yemen into Saudi Arabia to shoot down an Egyptian plane, or if unsuccessful, a U.S. military or civilian aircraft. A blank in October told us that unspecified extremist elements in Yemen had acquired SA-7's blank. Three, blank indicate the bin Laden organization or its allies are moving closer to implementing anti-U.S. attacks at unspecified locations, but we do not know whether they are related to attacks on aircraft. A bin Laden associate in Sudan late last month told a colleague in Kandahar that he had shipped a group of containers to Afghanistan. Bin Laden associates also talked about the movement of containers to Afghanistan before the East Africa bombings. In other blank, bin Laden associates last month discussed picking up a package in Malaysia. One told his colleague in Malaysia that they were in the ninth month of pregnancy. An alleged bin Laden supporter in Yemen late last month remarked to his mother that he planned to work in, quote, commerce from abroad and said his impending, quote, marriage, which would take place soon, would be a, quote, surprise. Commerce and marriage often are co-words for terrorist attacks. Blank. End of text. The same day, Clark convened a meeting of his CSG to discuss both the hijacking concern and the anti-aircraft missile threat. To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East Coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York police department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8 with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process at all three New York City area airports. The intelligence community could learn little about the source of the information. Later in December and again in early January 1999, more information arrived from the same source, reporting that the planned hijacking had been stalled because two of the operatives who were sketchily described had been arrested near Washington, D.C. or New York. After investigation, the FBI could find no information to support the hijack threat, nor could it verify any arrests like those described in the report. The FAA alert at the New York area airports ended on January 31, 1999. On December 17, the day after the United States and Britain began their Desert Fox bombing campaign against Iraq, the small group convened to discuss intelligence suggesting imminent bin Laden attacks on the U.S. embassies in Qatar and Ethiopia. The next day, Director Tenet sent a memo to the president, the cabinet and senior officials throughout the government, describing reports that bin Laden planned to attack U.S. targets very soon, possibly over the next few days, before Ramadan celebrations began. Tenet said he was greatly concerned. With alarms sounding, members of the small group considered ideas about how to respond to or prevent such attacks. General Shelton and Zinni came up with military options. Special operations forces were later told that they might be ordered to attempt very high-risk in-and-out raids, either in Khartoum to capture a senior bin Laden operative known as Apuhafs the Mauritanian, who appeared to be engineering some of the plots, or in Kandahar to capture bin Laden himself. Shelton told us that such operations are not risk-free, invoking the memory of the 1993 Black Hawk Down fiasco in Mogadishu. The CIA reported on December 18 that bin Laden might be traveling to Kandahar and could be targeted there with cruise missiles. Vessels with Tamahakuz missiles were on station in the Arabian Sea and could fire within a few hours of receiving target data. On December 20, intelligence indicated bin Laden would be spending the night at the Haji Habash House, part of the governor's residence in Kandahar. The chief of the bin Laden unit, Mike, told us that he promptly briefed Tenet and his deputy John Gordon. From the field, the CIA, Gary Shroen, advised, hit him tonight, we may not get another chance. An urgent teleconference of principals was arranged. The principals considered a cruise missile strike to try to kill bin Laden. One issue they discussed was the potential collateral damage, the number of innocent bystanders who would be killed or wounded. General Zinni predicted a number well over 200 and was concerned about damage to a nearby mosque. The senior intelligence officer on the joint staff apparently made a different calculation estimating half as much collateral damage and not predicting damage to the mosque. By the end of the meeting, the principals decided against recommending to the president that he order a strike. A few weeks later, in January 1999, Clark wrote that the principals had thought the intelligence only half reliable and had worried about killing or injuring perhaps 300 people. Tenet said he remembered doubts about the reliability of the source and concern about hitting the nearby mosque. Mike remembered Tenet telling him that the military was concerned that a few hours had passed since the last sighting of bin Laden and that this persuaded everyone that the chance of failure was too great. Some lower level officials were angry. Mike reported to Shroen that he had been unable to sleep after this decision. I'm sure we'll regret not acting last night, he wrote, criticizing the principals for worrying that some stray shrapnel might hit the Habash mosque and offend Muslims. He commented that they had not shown comparable sensitivity when deciding to bomb Muslims in Iraq. The principals, he said, were obsessed with trying to get others, Saudis, Pakistanis, Afghan tribals, to do what we won't do. Shroen was disappointed too. We should have done it last night, he wrote. We may welcome to regret the decision not to go ahead. The Joint Staff's Deputy Director for Operations agreed, even though he told us that later intelligence appeared to show that bin Laden had left his quarters before the strike would have occurred. Missing bin Laden, he said, would have caused us a hell of a problem but it was a shot we should have taken and we would have had to pay the price. The principals began considering other more aggressive covert alternatives using the tribals. CIA officers suggested that the tribals would prefer to try a raid rather than a roadside ambush because they would have better control, it would be less dangerous, and it played more to their skills and experience. But everyone knew that if the tribals were to conduct such a raid, guns would be blazing. The current memorandum of notification instructed the CIA to capture bin Laden and to use lethal force only in self-defense. Work now began on a new memorandum that would give the tribals more latitude. The intention was to say that they could use lethal force if the attempted capture seemed impossible to complete successfully. Early drafts of this highly sensitive document emphasized that it authorized only a capture operation. The tribals were to be paid only if they captured bin Laden, not if they killed him. Officials throughout the government approved this draft, but on December 21, the day after principals decided not to launch the cruise missile strike against Kandahar, the CIA's leaders urged strengthening the language to allow the tribals to be paid whether bin Laden was captured or killed. Berger and Tenet then worked together to take this line of thought even further. They finally agreed, as Berger reported to President Clinton, that an extraordinary step was necessary. The new memorandum would allow the killing of bin Laden if the CIA and the tribals judged that capture was not feasible. A judgment it already seemed clear they had reached. The Justice Department lawyer, who worked on the draft, told us that what was envisioned was a group of tribals assaulting a location leading to a shootout. Bin Laden and others would be captured if possible, but probably would be killed. The administration's position was that, under the law of armed conflict, killing a person who poses an imminent threat to the United States would be an act of self-defense, not an assassination. On Christmas Eve, 1998, Berger sent a final draft to President Clinton with an explanatory memo. The President approved the document. Because the White House considered this operation highly sensitive, only a tiny number of people knew about this memorandum of notification. Berger arranged for the NSC's legal advisor to inform Albright, Cohen, Shelton, and Reno. None was allowed to keep a copy. Congressional leaders were briefed as required by law. Attorney General Reno had sent a letter to the President expressing her concern. She warned of possible retaliation, including the targeting of U.S. officials. She did not pose any legal objection. A copy of the final document, along with the carefully crafted instructions that were to be sent to the tribals, was given to Tennant. A message from Tennant to CIA field agents directed them to communicate to the tribals the instructions authorized by the President. The United States preferred that Bin Laden and his lieutenants be captured, but if a successful capture operation was not feasible, the tribals were permitted to kill them. The instructions added that the tribals must avoid killing others unnecessarily and must not kill or abuse Bin Laden or his lieutenants if they surrendered. Finally, the tribals would not be paid if this set of requirements was not met. The field officer passed these instructions to the tribals word for word, but he prefaced the directions with the message. From the American President down to the average man in the street, we want him, Bin Laden, stopped. If the tribals captured Bin Laden, the officer assured them that he would receive a fair trial under U.S. law and be treated humanely. The CIA officer reported that the tribals said they fully understand the contents, implications, and the spirit of the message, and that their response was, we will try our best to capture Bin Laden alive and will have no intention of killing or harming him on purpose. The tribals explained that they wanted to prove that their standards of behavior were more civilized than those of Bin Laden and his band of terrorists. In an additional note addressed to Shrowan, the tribals noted that if they were to adopt Bin Laden's ethics, we would have finished the job long before. But they had been limited by their abilities and by our beliefs and laws we have to respect. Shrowan and Mike were impressed by the tribals' reaction. Shrowan cabled that the tribals were not in it for the money but as an investment in the future of Afghanistan. Mike agreed that the tribals' reluctance to kill was not a showstopper. From our view, he wrote, that seems in character and fair enough. Policymakers in the Clinton administration, including the President and his National Security Advisor, told us that the President's intent regarding covert action against Bin Laden was clear. He wanted him dead. This intent was never well communicated or understood within the CIA. Tenet told the Commission that, except in one specific case discussed later, the CIA was authorized to kill Bin Laden only in the context of a capture operation. CIA senior managers, operators, and lawyers confirmed this understanding. We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him, a former chief of the Bin Laden unit said. In February 1999, another draft memorandum of notification went to President Clinton. It asked him to allow the CIA to give exactly the same guidance to the Northern Alliance as had just been given to the tribals. They could kill Bin Laden if a successful capture operation was not feasible. On this occasion, however, President Clinton crossed out key language he had approved in December and inserted more ambiguous language. No one we interviewed could shed light on why the President did this. President Clinton told the Commission that he had no recollection of why he rewrote the language. Later in 1999, when legal authority was needed for enlisting still other collaborators and for covering a wider set of contingencies, the lawyers returned to the language used in August 1998, which authorized force only in the context of a capture operation. Given the closely held character of the document approved in December 1998 and the subsequent return to the earlier language, it is possible to understand how the former White House official and the CIA officials might disagree as to whether the CIA was ever authorized by the President to kill Bin Laden. The dispute turned out to be somewhat academic as the limits of available legal authority were not tested. Clark commented to Berger that despite expanded authority for CIA sources to engage in direct action, they have shown no inclination to do so. He added that it was his impression that the CIA thought the Tribals unlikely to act against Bin Laden and hence relying on them was unrealistic. Events seemed to bear him out since the Tribals did not stage an attack on Bin Laden or his associates during 1999. The Tribals remained active collectors of intelligence, however, providing good but not predictive information about Bin Laden's whereabouts. The CIA also tried to improve its intelligence reporting on Bin Laden by what Tenets Assistant Director for Collection, the indefatigable Charles Allen, called an all out, all agency, seven days a week effort. The effort might have had an effect. On January 12, 1999, Clark wrote Berger that the CIA's confidence in the Tribals reporting had increased. It was now higher than it had been on December 20. In February 1999, Allen proposed flying a U-2 mission over Afghanistan to build a baseline of intelligence outside the areas where the Tribals had coverage. Clark was nervous about such a mission because he continued to fear that Bin Laden might leave for someplace less accessible. He wrote Deputy National Security Advisor Donald Carrick that one reliable source reported Bin Laden's having met with Iraqi officials who may have offered him asylum. Other intelligence sources said that some Taliban leaders, though not Mullah Omar, had urged Bin Laden to go to Iraq. If Bin Laden actually moved to Iraq, wrote Clark, his network would be at Saddam Hussein's service and it would be virtually impossible to find him. Better to get Bin Laden in Afghanistan, Clark declared. Berger suggested sending one U-2 flight, but Clark opposed even this. It would require Pakistani approval, he wrote, and Pakistan's intelligence service is in bed with Bin Laden and would warn him that the United States was getting ready for a bombing campaign. Armed with that knowledge, old Wiley Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad. Though told also by Bruce Raidell of the NSC staff that Saddam Hussein wanted Bin Laden and Baghdad, Berger conditionally authorized a single U-2 flight. Alan meanwhile had found other ways of getting the information he wanted, so the U-2 flight never occurred. End of Chapter 4.4 Chapter 4.5 of the 9-11 Commission Report This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The 9-11 Commission Report, Chapter 4.5 Boots on the Ground Starting on the day that August 1998 strikes were launched, General Shelton had issued a planning order to prepare follow-on strikes and think beyond just using cruise missiles. The initial strikes had been called Operation Infinite Reach. The follow-on plans were given the codename Operation Infinite Resolve. At the time, any actual military action in Afghanistan would have been carried out by General Zini's central command. This command was therefore the locus for most military planning. Zini was even less enthusiastic than Cohen and Shelton about follow-on cruise missile strikes. He knew that the Tomahawks did not always hit their targets. After the August 20 strikes, President Clinton had had to call Pakistani Prime Minister Sherif to apologize for a wayward missile that had killed several people in a Pakistani village. Sherif had been understanding while commenting on American quote-unquote overkill. Zini feared that bin Laden would in the future vocate himself in cities where U.S. missiles could kill thousands of Afghans. He worried also less Pakistani authorities not get adequate warning, think the missiles came from India, and do something that everyone would later regret. Discussing potential repercussions in the region of his military responsibility, Zini said quote, It was easy to take the shot from Washington and walk away from it. We had to live there, unquote. Zini's distinct preference would have been to build up counter-terrorism capabilities in neighboring countries such as Ubekistan. But he told us that he could not bring up much interest in or money for such a purpose from Washington. Partly he thought because these countries had dictatorial governments. After the decision in which fear of collateral damage was an important factor not to use cruise missiles against Kandahar in December 1998, Shelton and officers in the Pentagon developed plans for using an AC-130 gunship instead of cruise missile strikes. Designed specifically for the Special Forces, the version of the AC-130, known as quote-unquote spooky, can fly in fast or from high altitude. Protected by radar, guided to its zone by extraordinary complex electronics, it is capable of rapidly firing precision-guided 25, 40, and 105 mm projectiles. Because the system could target more precisely than a salvo of cruise missiles, it had a much lower risk of causing collateral damage. After giving Clark a briefing and being encouraged to proceed, Shelton formally directed Zini and General Peter Schumaker, who headed the Special Operations Command to develop plans for an AC-130 mission against bin Laden's headquarters and infrastructure in Afghanistan. The joint staff prepared a decision paper for deployment of the Special Operations aircraft. Though Berger and Clark continued to indicate interest in this option, the AC-130s were never deployed. Clark wrote at the time that Zini opposed their use, and John Mayer, the joint staff's deputy director of operations, agreed that this was Zini's position. Zini himself does not recall blocking the option. He told us that he understood the Special Operations Command had never thought the intelligence good enough to justify actually moving AC-130s into position. Schumaker says, on the contrary, that he thought the AC-130 option feasible. The most likely explanation for the two General's differing recollections is that both of them thought serious preparation for any such operation would require a long-term redeployment of Special Operations forces to the Middle East or South Asia. The AC-130s would need bases because the aircraft's unrefueled range was only a little over 2,000 miles. They needed search and rescue backup, which would have still less range. Thus, an AC-130 deployment had to be embedded in a wider political and military concept involving Pakistan or other neighboring countries to address issues relating to basing an overflight. No one ever put such an initiative on the table. Zini therefore cautioned about simply ordering up AC-130 deployments for a quick strike. Schumaker planned for what he saw as a practical strike option, and the underlying issues were not fully engaged. The joint staff decision paper was never turned into an interagency policy paper. The same was true for the option of using ground units from Special Operations Command. Within the command, some officers, such as Schumaker, wanted the mission of, quote, putting boots on the ground, unquote, to get at bin Laden and al-Qaeda. At the time, Special Operations was designated as, quote, support and command, unquote, not a quote, supported command, unquote. That is, it supported a theater commander and did not prepare its own plans for dealing with al-Qaeda. Schumaker proposed to Shelton and Cohen that Special Operations became a supported command, but the proposal was not adopted. Had it been accepted, he says, he would have taken on the al-Qaeda mission instead of deferring to Zini. Lieutenant General William Boykin, the current deputy under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and a founding member of Delta Force, told us that, quote, opportunities were missed because of an unwillingness to take risk and a lack of vision and understanding. Unquote. President Clinton relied on the advice of General Shelton, who informed him that without intelligence on bin Laden's location, a commander raids chance of failure was high. Shelton told President Clinton that he would go forward with, quote, boots on the ground, unquote, if the President ordered him to do so. However, he had to ensure that the President was completely aware of the large logistical problems inherent in a military operation. The Special Operations plans were apparently conceived as another quick-strike option, an option to insert forces after the United States received actionable intelligence. President Clinton told the Commission that, quote, if we had really good intelligence about where Osama bin Laden was, I would have done it, unquote. Zini and Shoemaker did make preparations for possible, very high-risk in-and-out operations to capture or kill terrorists. Cohen told the Commission that the notion of putting military personnel on the ground without some reasonable certitude that bin Laden was in a particular location would have resulted in the mission's failure and the loss of life in a fruitless effort. None of the officials were aware of the ambitious plan developed months earlier by lower-level defense officials. In our interviews, some military officers repeatedly invoked the analogy of Desert One and the failed 1980 hostage rescue mission in Iran. They were dubious about a quick-strike approach to using special operations forces, which they thought complicated and risky. Such efforts would have required basis in the region, but all of the options were unappealing. Pro-Taliban elements of Pakistan's military might warn bin Laden or its associates of pending operations. With nearly basing options limited, an alternative was to fly from ships in the Arabian Sea or from land bases in the Persian Gulf, as was done after 9-11. Such operations would then have to be supported from long distances, overflying the airspace of nations that might not have been supportive or aware of U.S. efforts. However, these hurdles were addressed and if the military could then operate regularly in the region for a long period, perhaps clandestinely, it might attempt to gather intelligence and wait for an opportunity. One special operations commander said his view of actionable intelligence was that if you, quote, give me the action, I will give you the intelligence, unquote. But this course would still be risky and light both of the difficulties already mentioned and of the danger that U.S. operations might fail disastrously. We have found no evidence that such a long-term political-military approach for using special operations forces in the region was proposed to or analyzed by the small group, even though such capability had been honed for at least a decade within the Defense Department. Therefore, the debate looked to some like bold proposals from civilians meeting hypercaution from the military. Clark saw it this way. Of the military, he said to us, quote, they were very, very, very reluctant, unquote. But from another perspective, poorly informed proposals for bold action were pitted against experienced professional judgment. That was how Secretary of Defense Cohen viewed it. He said to us, quote, I would have to place my judgment call in terms of do I believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former commander of Special Forces Command, is in a better position to make a judgment on the feasibility of this than perhaps Mr. Clark, unquote. Beyond a large-scale political-military commitment to build up a covert or clandestine capability using American personnel on the ground, either military or CIA, there was still larger option that could have been considered in fading Afghanistan itself. Every official we questioned about the possibility of an invasion in Afghanistan said that it was almost unthinkable, absent of provocations such as 9-11, because of poor prospects for cooperation from Pakistan and other nations, because they believed the public would not support it. Cruise missiles were, and will remain, the only military option on the table. Early in 1999, the CIA received reporting that bin Laden was spending much of his time at one of several camps in Afghanistan, desert south of Kandahar. At the beginning of February, bin Laden was reportedly located in the vicinity of the Sheikh Ali Camp, a desert hunting camp being used by visitors from a Gulf state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab Emirates. Reporting from the CIA's assets provided a detailed description of the hunting camp, including its size, location, resources, and security, as well as of bin Laden's smaller adjacent camp. Because this was not an urban area, missiles launched against it would have less risk of causing collateral damage. On February 8th, the military began to ready itself for a possible strike. The next day, National Technical Intelligence confirmed the location and description of the larger camp, and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the United Arab Emirates. But the location of bin Laden's quarters could not be pinned down so precisely. The CIA did its best to answer a host of questions about the larger camp and its residents, and about bin Laden's daily schedule and routines to support military contingency planning. According to reporting from the tribals, bin Laden regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emirates. The tribals expected him to be at the hunting camp for such a visit, at least until bin warming on February 11th. Clark wrote to Burger's deputy on February 10th that the military was then doing targeting work to hit the main camp with cruise missiles, and should be in position to strike the following morning. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastart appears to have been briefed on the subject. No strike was launched. By February 12th, bin Laden had apparently moved on, and the immediate strike plans became moot. According to CIA and defense officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike would kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might have been with bin Laden or close by. Clark told us the strike was called off after consultations with Director Tennant because the intelligence was dubious, and it seemed to Clark as if the CIA was presenting an option to attack America's best counter-terrorism ally in the Gulf. The lead CIA official in the field, Gary Schrone, felt that the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable. The bin Laden unit chief, Mike, agreed. Schrone believed today that this was a lost opportunity to kill bin Laden before 9-11. Even after bin Laden's departure from the area, CIA officers hoped he might return, seeing the camp as a magnet that could draw him for as long as it was still set up. The military maintained a readiness for another strike opportunity. On March 7th, 1999, Clark called an UAE official to express his concerns about possible associations between Emirati officials and bin Laden. Clark later wrote in a memorandum of this conversation that the call had been approved at an intelligency meeting and cleared with the CIA. When the former bin Laden unit chief found out about Clark's call, he questioned CIA officials who denied having given such clearance. Imagery confirmed that less than a week after Clark's phone call, the camp was hurriedly dismantled, and the site was deserted. CIA officials, including deputy director for operations Povat were right. Our rate. Mike thought the dismantling of the camp erased the possible site for targeting bin Laden. The United Arab Emirates was becoming both a valued counter-terrorism ally of the United States and a persistent counter-terrorism problem. From 1999 through early 2001, the United States and President Clinton personally pressed the UAE, one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off its ties and enforce sanctions, especially those relating to flights to and from Afghanistan. These efforts achieved little before 9-11. In July 1999, UAE, Ministry of State for Foreign Affairs, Hamdan bin Zayed, threatened to break with the Taliban over bin Laden. The Taliban did not take him seriously, however. Zayed later told an American diplomat that the UAE valued its relations with the Taliban because Afghan radicals offered a counter-balance to Iranian dangers in the region. But he also noted that the UAE did not want to upset the United States. Looking for new partners Although not all CIA officials had lost face in tribal's capabilities, many judged them to be good reporters. Few believed that they'd carried out an ambush of bin Laden. The chief of the counter-terrorist center compared relying on the tribals to playing the lottery. He and his associates, supported by Clark, pressed for developing a partnership with the Northern Alliance. Even though doing so might bring the United States squarely behind one side in Afghanistan's long-running civil war. The Northern Alliance was dominated by Tajiks and drew its strength mainly from the northern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. In contrast, Taliban members came principally from Afghanistan's most numerous ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who were concentrated in the southern part of the country. Extending into the northwest frontier in Balu-Kustin provinces in Pakistan. Because of the Taliban's behavior and its association with Pakistan, the Northern Alliance had been able at various times to obtain assistance from Russia, Iran, and India. The Alliance's leader was Afghanistan's most renowned military commander, Ahmed Shah Massad. Reflective and charismatic, he had been one of the true heroes of the war against the Soviets. But his bands had been charged with more than one massacre, and the Northern Alliance was widely thought to finance itself in part through trading heroin. Nor had Massad shown much aptitude for governing, except as ruthless warlord. Nevertheless, Tannit told us Massad seemed the most interesting possible new ally against bin Laden. In February 1999, Tannit sought President Clinton's authorization to enlist Massad and his forces as partners. In response to this request, the President signed the memorandum of notification, whose language he personally altered. Tannit says he saw no significance in the President's changes. So far as he was concerned, it was the language of August 1998 expressing a preference for capture, but accepting the possibility that bin Laden could not be brought out alive. We were blowing the same ground, Tannit said. CIA officers described Massad's reaction when he heard that the United States wanted him to capture and not kill bin Laden. One characterized Massad's body language as, quote-unquote, a wintz. Schroner called Massad's response as, quote, you guys are crazy, you haven't changed a bit, unquote. In Schroner's opinion, the capture provides though inhibited Massad and his forces from going after bin Laden, but did not completely stop them. The idea, however, was a long shot. Bin Laden's usual base of activity was near Kandahar, far from the front lines of Taliban operations against the Northern Alliance. Kandahar, May 1999. It was in Kandahar that perhaps the last and most likely the best opportunity arose for targeting bin Laden with cruise missiles before 9-11. In May 1999, CIA assets in Afghanistan reported on bin Laden's location in and around Kandahar over the course of five days and nights. The reporting was very detailed and came from several sources. If this intelligence was not, quote-unquote, actionable, working-level officials said at the time and today it was hard for them to imagine how any intelligence on bin Laden and Afghanistan would meet the standard. Communications were good and the cruise missiles were ready. Quote, this was in our strike zone, unquote, a senior military officer said. Quote, it was a fat pitch, a home run, unquote. He expected the missiles to fly. When the decision came back that they should stand down, not shoot, the officer said, quote, we all just slumped, unquote. He told us he knew of no one at the Pentagon or the CIA who thought it was a bad gamble. Bin Laden, quote, should have been a dead man, unquote, that night, he said. Working-level CIA officials agreed. While there was a conflicting intelligence report about bin Laden's whereabouts, the experts discounted it. At the time, CIA working-level officials were told by their managers that the strikes were not ordered because the military doubted the intelligence and worried about collateral damage. Replying to a frustrated colleague in the field, the bin Laden unit chief wrote, quote, having a chance to get bin Laden three times in 36 hours, for going the chance each time has made me a bit angry. The DCI finds himself alone at the table with the other principals, basically saying, we'll go along with your decision, Mr. Director, and implicitly saying that the agencies will hang alone if the attack doesn't get bin Laden, unquote. But the military officer quoted earlier, recalled that the Pentagon had been willing to act. He told us that Clark informed him and others that Tenet assessed the chance of the intelligence being accurate as 50-50. This officer believed that Tenet's assessment was the key to the decision. Tenet told us he does not remember any details about this episode, except that the intelligence came from a single, uncooperated source, and that there was a risk of collateral damage. The story is further complicated by Tenet's absence from the critical principals meeting on the strike. He was apparently out of town. His deputy, John Gordon, was representing the CIA. Gordon recalled having presented the intelligence in a positive light, with appropriate caveats, but stating that this intelligence was about as good as it could get. Berger remembered only that in all such cases, the call had been Tenet's. Berger felt sure that Tenet was eager to get bin Laden. In his view, Tenet did his job responsibly, quote, Georgia would call and say, we just don't have it, unquote, Berger said. The decision not to strike in May 1999 may now seem hard to understand. In fairness, we note two points. First, in December 1998, the principal's wariness about ordering a strike appears to have been vindicated. Bin Laden left his room unexpectedly, and if a strike had been ordered, he would not have been hit. Second, the administration and the CIA in particular was in the midst of intense scrutiny and criticism in May 1999, because faulty intelligence had just led the United States to mistakenly bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the NATO war against Serbia. This episode may have made officials more cautious than otherwise had been the case. From May 1999 until September 2001, policymakers did not again actively consider missile strike against Bin Laden. The principal's did give some further consideration in 1999 to more general strikes, reviving Clarke's, quote, Delenda, unquote, notion of hitting camps and infrastructure to disrupt Al Qaeda's organization. In the first months of 1999, the joint staff had developed a broader target list to undertake a, quote, unquote, focus campaign against the infrastructure of Bin Laden's network and to hit Taliban government sites as well. General Shelton told us that the Taliban targets were, quote, unquote, easier to hit and more substantial. Part of the context for considering broader strikes in the summer of 1999 was renewed worry about Bin Laden's ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction. In May and June, the U.S. government received a flurry of ominous reports, including more information about chemical weapons training or development at the Dorenta camp and possible attempts to amass nuclear material at Herat. By late June, U.S. and other intelligence services had concluded that Al Qaeda was in pre-attack mode, perhaps again involving Abu Hafs, the Maritanian. On June 25th at Clarke's request, Berger convened the small group in his office to discuss the alert. Bin Laden's WMD programs and his location, quote, should we preempt by attacking UBL facilities, quote, Clarke urged Berger to ask his colleagues. In his handwritten notes on the meeting paper, Berger jotted down the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnik Farms facility, which could mean 60 to 65 casualties. Berger noted that the possible, quote, unquote, slight impact on Bin Laden and added, quote, if he responds, we're blamed, unquote. The NSC staff raised the option of waiting until after a terrorist attack and then retaliating, including possible strikes on the Taliban. But Clarke observed that Bin Laden would probably empty his camps after an attack. The military route seemed to have reached a dead end. In December 1999, Clarke asked Berger to ask the principals to ask themselves, quote, why have there been no real options lately for direct U.S. military action, unquote. There are no notes recording whether the question was discussed or if it was how it was answered. Reports of possible attacks by Bin Laden kept coming on throughout 1999. They included a threat to blow up the FBI building in Washington, D.C. In September, the CSG reviewed a possible threat to a flight out of Los Angeles or New York. These warnings came amid dozens of others that flooded in. With military and diplomatic options practically exhausted by the summer of 1999, the U.S. government seemed to be backward had been in the summer of 1998, relying on the CIA to find some other option. That picture also seemed discouraging. Several disruptions and renditions aimed against the broader al-Qaeda network had succeeded, but covert action upwards in Afghanistan had not been fruitful. In mid-1999, new leaders arrived at the counter-terrorist center in the Bin Laden unit. The new director of CTC, replacing Jeff, was Cofer Black. The new head of the section that included the Bin Laden unit was Richard. Black. Richard and their colleague began working on a new operational strategy for attacking al-Qaeda. Their starting point was to get better intelligence, relying more on the CIA's own sources, unless on the tribals. In July 1999, President Clinton authorized the CIA to work with several governments to capture Bin Laden and extend the scope of efforts to Bin Laden's principal lieutenant. The president reportedly also authorized a covert action under carefully limited circumstances, which, if successful, would have resulted in Bin Laden's death. Attorney General Reno against expressed concerns on policy grounds. She was worried about the danger of retaliation. The CIA also developed a short-lived effort to work with the Pakistani team that we discussed earlier, and an initiative to work with Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks needed basic equipment and training. No action could be expected from March 2000 at the earliest. In fall 1999, DCI tenet unveiled the CIA's new Bin Laden strategy. It was called simply, quote unquote, the plan. The plan proposed continuing disruption in rendition operations worldwide. It announced their program for hiring and trading better officers with counter-terrorism skills, recruiting more assets and trying to penetrate al-Qaeda's ranks. The plan aimed to close gaps in technical intelligence collection, signal and imagery as well. In addition, the CIA would increase context with Northern Alliance rebels fighting the Taliban. With the new operation strategy, the CIA evaluated its capture options. None scored high marks. The CIA had no confidence in the Pakistani efforts. In the event that Bin Laden traveled to the Kandahar region in southern Afghanistan, the tribal network there was unlikely to attack a heavily guarded Bin Laden. The counter-terrorist center rated their chance of success at less than 80%. To the northwest, Uzbeks might be ready for a cross-border sortie in six months. Their chance of success was also rated at less than 10%. And the northeast were Mossad's Northern Alliance forces. Perhaps the CIA's best option. In late October, a group of officials from the counter-terrorist center flew into the Pond Shear valley to meet up with Mossad, a hazardous journey in rickety helicopters that would be repeated several times in the future. Mossad appeared committed to helping the United States collect intelligence on Bin Laden's activities and whereabouts and agreed to try to capture him if the opportunity arose. The Bin Laden unit was satisfied that its reporting on Bin Laden would now have a second source, but it also knew that Mossad would act against Bin Laden only if his own interests and those of the United States were intersected. By early December, the CIA rated this possibility at less than 15%. Finally, the CIA considered the possibility of putting US personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. The CIA had been discussing this option with Special Operations Command and found an enthusiasm on the working level, but reluctance at higher levels. CIA saw a 95% chance of Special Operations command forces capturing Bin Laden if deployed, but less than a 5% chance of such deployment. Sending CIA officers into Afghanistan was to be considered, quote, if the gain clearly outweighs the risk, unquote, but at this time no such gains presented themselves to warrant the risk. As mentioned earlier, such a protracted deployment of US Special Operations forces into Afghanistan, perhaps as part of a team joined to a deployment of the CIA's own officers, would have required a major policy initiative, probably combined with efforts to secure the support of at least one or two neighboring countries, to make a long-term commitment, establish a durable presence on the ground, and be prepared to accept the associated risks and costs. Such a military plan was never developed for interagency consideration before 9-11. As 1999 came to a close, the CIA had a new strategic plan in place for capturing Bin Laden, but no option was rated as having more than a 15% chance of achieving that object. End of Chapter 4.5 Thank you for watching.