Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action
The New York Times
MISSED SIGNALS
Page 2
December 30, 2001
This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and
Don Van Natta Jr. and written by Ms. Miller.
nytimes.com
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Diplomacy and Politics
A Growing Effort Against bin Laden
As Mr. Clinton prepared his re-election bid in 1996, the
administration made several crucial decisions.
Recognizing the growing significance of Mr. bin Laden,
the C.I.A. created a virtual station, code-named Alex, to
track his activities around the world.
In the Middle East, American diplomats pressed the
hard-line Islamic regime of Sudan to expel Mr. bin Laden,
even if that pushed him back into Afghanistan.
To build support for this effort among Middle Eastern
governments, the State Department circulated a dossier
that accused Mr. bin Laden of financing radical Islamic
causes around the world.
The document implicated him in several attacks on
Americans, including the 1992 bombing of a hotel in
Aden, Yemen, where American troops had stayed on their
way to Somalia. It also said Mr. bin Laden's associates had
trained the Somalis who killed 18 American servicemen in
Mogadishu in 1993.
Sudanese officials met with their C.I.A. and State
Department counterparts and signaled that they might
turn Mr. bin Laden over to another country. Saudi Arabia
and Egypt were possibilities.
State Department and C.I.A. officials urged both Egypt
and Saudi Arabia to accept him, according to former
Clinton officials. "But both were afraid of the domestic
reaction and refused," one recalled.
Critics of the administration's effort said this was an early
missed opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda. Mr. Clinton
himself would have had to lean hard on the Saudi and
Egyptian governments. The White House believed no
amount of pressure would change the outcome, and Mr.
Clinton risked spending valuable capital on a losing
cause. "We were not about to have the president make a
call and be told no," one official explained.
Sudan obliquely hinted that it might turn Mr. bin Laden
over to the United States, a former official said. But the
Justice Department reviewed the case and concluded in
the spring of 1996 that it did not have enough evidence to
charge him with the attacks on American troops in Yemen
and Somalia.
In May 1996, Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden, confiscating
some of his substantial fortune. He moved his
organization to Afghanistan, just as an obscure group
known as the Taliban was taking control of the country.
Clinton administration officials counted it as a positive
step. Mr. bin Laden was on the run, deprived of the tacit
state sponsorship he had enjoyed in Sudan.
"He lost his base and momentum," said Samuel R. Berger,
Mr. Clinton's national security adviser in his second term.
In July 1996, shortly after Mr. bin Laden left Sudan, Mr.
Clinton met at the White House with Dick Morris, his
political adviser, to hone themes for his re-election
campaign.
The previous month, a suicide bomber had detonated a
truck bomb at a military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing
19 American servicemen. Days later, T.W.A. Flight 800
had exploded off Long Island, leaving 230 people dead in a
crash that was immediately viewed as terrorism.
Mr. Morris said he had devised an attack advertisement of
the sort that Senator Bob Dole, the Republican candidate,
might use against Mr. Clinton and had shown it to a
sampling of voters. Seven percent of those who saw it said
they would switch from Mr. Clinton to Mr. Dole.
"Out of control. Two airline disasters. One linked to
terrorism," the advertisement said. "F.A.A. asleep at the
switch. Terror in Saudi Arabia." Mr. Morris said he told
Mr. Clinton that he could neutralize such a line of attack
by adopting tougher policies on terrorism and airport
security. He said his polls had found support for
tightening security and confronting terrorists. Voters
favored military action against suspected terrorist
installations in other countries. They backed a federal
takeover of airport screening and even supported
deployment of the military inside the United States to
fight terrorism.
Mr. Morris said he tried and failed to persuade the
president to undertake a broader war on terrorism.
Mr. Clinton declined repeated requests for an interview,
but a spokeswoman, Julia Payne, said: "Terrorism was
always a top priority in the Clinton administration. The
president chose to get his foreign policy advice from the
likes of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and not
Dick Morris."
On July 25, Mr. Clinton announced that he had put Vice
President Al Gore at the head of a commission on aviation
safety and security. Within weeks, the panel had drafted
more than two dozen recommendations. Its final report, in
February 1997, added dozens more.
Among the most important, commission members said,
was a proposal that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. share information
about suspected terrorists for the databases maintained
by each airline. If a suspected terrorist bought a ticket,
both the airline and the government would find out.
Progress was slow, particularly after federal investigators
determined that the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 resulted
from a mechanical flaw, not terrorism. The commission's
recommendation languished - until Sept. 11, when two
people already identified by the government as suspected
terrorists boarded separate American Airlines flights from
Boston using their own names.
That morning, no alarms went off. The system proposed by
the Gore commission was still not in place. The
government is now moving to share more information with
the airlines about suspected terrorists.
"Unfortunately, it takes a dramatic event to focus the
government's and public's attention, especially on an
issue as amorphous as terrorism," said Gerry Kauvar, staff
director of the commission and now a senior policy analyst
at the RAND Corporation.
Focusing on Al Qaeda
A Clearer Picture, A Disjointed Fight
As Mr. Clinton began his second term, American
intelligence agencies were assembling a clearer picture of
the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which
was making substantial headway in Afghanistan.
A few months earlier, the first significant defector from Al
Qaeda had walked into an American Embassy in Africa
and provided a detailed account of the organization's
operations and ultimate objectives.
The defector, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, told American officials
that Mr. bin Laden had taken aim at the United States
and other Western governments, broadening his initial
goal of overthrowing Saudi Arabia and other "infidel"
Middle Eastern governments.
He said that Al Qaeda was trying to buy a nuclear bomb
and other unconventional weapons. Mr. bin Laden was
also trying to form an anti-American terrorist front that
would unite radical groups. But Mr. Fadl's statements
were not widely circulated within the government. A
senior official said their significance was not fully
understood by Mr. Clinton's top advisers until his public
testimony in 2000.
The war against Al Qaeda remained disjointed. While the
State Department listed Mr. bin Laden as a financier of
terror in its 1996 survey of terrorism, Al Qaeda was not
included on the list of terrorist organizations subject to
various sanctions released by the United States in 1997.
The F.B.I.'s counterterrorism experts, who were privy to
Mr. Fadl's debriefings, were growing increasingly
concerned about Islamic terrorism. "Almost all of the
groups today, if they chose, have the ability to strike us in
the United States," John P. O'Neill, a senior F.B.I. official
involved in counterterrorism, warned in a June 1997
speech.
The task, Mr. O'Neill said, was to "nick away" at terrorists'
ability to operate in the United States. (Mr. O'Neill left the
F.B.I. this year for a job as chief of security at the World
Trade Center, where he died on Sept. 11.)
As Mr. O'Neill spoke in Chicago, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. was
homing in on a Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.
The National Security Agency began eavesdropping on
telephone lines used by Al Qaeda members in the
country. On several occasions, calls to Mr. bin Laden's
satellite phone in Afghanistan were overheard. The F.B.I.
and C.I.A. searched a house in Kenya, seizing a computer
and questioning Wadih El-Hage, an American citizen
working as Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary.
American officials counted the operations as a success
and believed they had disrupted a potentially dangerous
terrorist cell. They were proved wrong on Aug. 7, 1998,
when truck bombs were detonated outside the United
States embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,
killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring
more than 5,000.
Stunned by the plot's ambition and precision, Mr. Clinton
vowed to punish the perpetrators, who were quickly
identified as Al Qaeda adherents. "No matter how long it
takes or where it takes us," the president said, "we will
pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is
done."
The political calculus, however, had changed markedly
since the president's triumph in the fall of 1996, and Mr.
Clinton was in no position to mount a sustained war
against terrorism.
His administration was weighed down by a scandal over
his relationship with a White House intern. Mr. Clinton
was about to acknowledge to a grand jury that his public
and private denials of the affair had been misleading.
Republicans depicted every foreign policy decision as an
attempt to distract voters.
Thirteen days after the embassy bombings, President
Clinton nonetheless ordered cruise missile strikes on a
Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan that officials said was linked to Mr. bin Laden and
chemical weapons.
But the volley of cruise missiles proved a setback for
American counterterrorism efforts. The C.I.A. had been
told that Mr. bin Laden and his entourage were meeting
at the camp, but the missiles struck just a few hours after
he left. And the owner of the pharmaceutical factory came
forward to claim that it had nothing to do with chemical
weapons, raising questions about whether the Sudan
strike had been in error.
The Clinton administration stood by its actions, but
several former officials said the criticism had an effect on
the pursuit of Al Qaeda: Mr. Clinton became even more
cautious about using force against terrorists.
Unfortunately, the quarry was becoming more dangerous.
In the two years since leaving Sudan, Mr. bin Laden had
built a formidable base in Afghanistan. He lavished
millions of dollars on the impoverished Taliban regime
and in exchange was allowed to operate a network of
training camps that attracted Islamic militants from all
over the world. In early 1998, just as he declared war on
Americans everywhere in the world, he cemented an
alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a ruthless and
effective group whose leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was
known for his operational skills.
(Continued) |
