Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action
The New York Times
MISSED SIGNALS
Page 3
December 30, 2001
The Battle Intensifies
Struggling to Track 'Enemy No. 1'
In the years after the embassy bombings, the Clinton
administration significantly stepped up its efforts to
destroy Al Qaeda, tracking its finances, plotting military
strikes to wipe out its leadership and prosecuting its
members for the bombings and other crimes. "From
August 1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1," Mr. Berger
said.
The campaign had the support of President Clinton and
his senior aides. But former administration officials
acknowledge that it never became the government's top
priority.
When it came to Pakistan, for example, American
diplomats continued to weigh the war on terrorism against
other pressing issues, including the need to enlist
Islamabad's help in averting a nuclear exchange with
India.
Similarly, a proposal to vastly enhance the Treasury
Department's ability to track global flows of terrorist
money languished until after Sept. 11. And American
officials were reluctant to press the oil-rich Saudis to
crack down on charities linked to radical causes.
Still, the fight against Al Qaeda gained new, high-level
attention after the embassy attacks, present and former
officials say. Between 1998 and 2000, the "Small Group"
of the Cabinet-rank principals involved in national
security met almost every week on terrorism, and the
Counterterrorism Security Group, led by Mr. Clarke, met
two or three times a week, officials said.
The United States disrupted some Qaeda cells, and
persuaded friendly intelligence services to arrange the
arrest and transfer of Al Qaeda members without formal
extradition or legal proceedings. Dozens were quietly sent
to Egypt and other countries to stand trial.
President Clinton also ordered a more aggressive program
of covert action, signing an intelligence order that allowed
him to use lethal force against Mr. bin Laden. Later, this
was expanded to include as many as a dozen of his top
lieutenants, officials said.
On at least four occasions, Mr. Clinton sent the C.I.A. a
secret "memorandum of notification," authorizing the
government to kill or capture Mr. bin Laden and, later,
other senior operatives. The C.I.A. then briefed members
of Congress about those plans.
The C.I.A. redoubled its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden's
movements, stationing submarines in the Indian Ocean to
await the president's launch order. To hit Mr. bin Laden,
the military said it needed to know where he would be 6
to 10 hours later - enough time to review the decision in
Washington and program the cruise missiles.
That search proved frustrating. Officials said the C.I.A. did
have some spies within Afghanistan. On at least three
occasions between 1998 and 2000, the C.I.A. told the
White House it had learned where Mr. bin Laden was and
where he might soon be.
Each time, Mr. Clinton approved the strike. Each time,
George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, called
the president to say that the information was not reliable
enough to be used in an attack, a former senior Clinton
administration official said.
In late 1998, according to former officials, intelligence
agents reported that Abu Hafs, a Mauritanian and an
important figure in Al Qaeda, was staying in Room 13 at
the Dana Hotel in Khartoum.
With such specific information in hand, White House
officials wanted Abu Hafs either killed or, preferably,
captured and transferred out of Sudan to a friendly state
where he could be interrogated, the former officials said.
The agency initially questioned whether it could
accomplish such a mission in a hostile, risky environment
like Sudan, putting it in the "too hard to do box," one
former official said. An intelligence official disputed this
account, saying the C.I.A. made "a full-tilt effort in a very
dangerous environment."
Eventually, the C.I.A. enlisted another government to help
seize Abu Hafs, a former official said, but by then it was
too late. The target had disappeared.
Officials said the White House pushed the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to develop plans for a commando raid to capture or
kill Mr. bin Laden. But the chairman, Gen. Henry H.
Shelton, and other senior Pentagon officers told Mr.
Clinton's top national security aides that they would need
to know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts 12 to 24 hours in
advance.
Pentagon planners also considered a White House request
to send a hunter team of commandos, small enough to
avoid detection, the officer said. General Shelton
discounted this option as naïve, the officer said.
White House officials were frustrated that the Pentagon
could not produce plans that involved a modest number of
troops. Military planners insisted that an attack on Al
Qaeda required thousands of troops invading Afghanistan.
"When you said this is what it would take, no one was
interested," a senior officer said.
A former administration official recently defended the
decision not to employ a commando strike. "It would have
been an assault without the kind of war we've seen over
the last three months to support it," the official said. "And
it would have been very unlikely to succeed."
Clinton administration officials also began trying to choke
off Al Qaeda's financial network. Shortly after the embassy
bombings, the United States began threatening states and
financial institutions with sanctions if they failed to cut off
assistance to those who did business with Al Qaeda and
the Taliban.
In 1999 and early 2000, some $255 million of
Taliban-controlled assets was blocked in United States
accounts, according to William F. Wechsler, a former
White House official.
Mr. Wechsler said the search for Al Qaeda's assets was
often stymied by poor cooperation from Middle Eastern
and South Asian states.
The United States, too, he added, had problems. "Few
intelligence officials who understand the nuances of the
global banking system" were fluent in Arabic. While the
C.I.A. had done a "reasonably good job" analyzing Al
Qaeda, he wrote, it was "poor" at developing sources
within Mr. bin Laden's financial network. The F.B.I., he
argued, had similar shortcomings.
Senior officials were frustrated by the C.I.A.'s inability to
find hard facts about Al Qaeda's financial operations.
Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had amassed
considerable detail about the group's finances, and that
information was used in the broad efforts to freeze its
accounts after Sept. 11.
At the State Department, officials reacted sharply to the
assault on the embassies. Michael Sheehan, the
department's former counterterrorism coordinator, said
that after the bombings, Secretary of State Madeleine K.
Albright met with her embassy security director every
morning and became increasingly focused on efforts to
protect her employees and installations.
But to Mr. Sheehan, the response was inadequate. He
believed that terrorism could be contained only if
Washington devised a "comprehensive political strategy to
pressure Pakistan and other neighbors and allies into
isolating not only Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but the
Taliban and others who provide them sanctuary," he said,
and that did not happen. There were competing priorities.
"Our reaction was responsive, almost never proactive," he
said.
'We Were Flying Blind'
An Arrest, a Review And New Obstacles
The arrest of Ahmed Ressam was the clearest sign that
Osama bin Laden was trying to bring the jihad to the
United States.
Mr. Ressam was arrested when he tried to enter the
United States in Port Angeles, Wash., on Dec. 14, 1999.
Inside his rental car, agents found 130 pounds of
bomb-making chemicals and detonator components.
His arrest helped reveal what intelligence officials later
concluded was a Qaeda plot to unleash attacks during the
millennium celebrations, aimed at an American ship in
Yemen, tourist sites and a hotel in Jordan, and unknown
targets in the United States.
"That was a wake-up call," a senior law enforcement officer
said, "not for law enforcement and intelligence, but for
policy makers." Just as the embassy bombings had
exposed the threat of Al Qaeda overseas, the millennium
plot revealed gaping vulnerabilities at home.
"If you understood Al Qaeda, you knew something was
going to happen," said Robert M. Bryant, who was the
deputy director of the F.B.I. when he retired in 1999. "You
knew they were going to hit us, but you didn't know
where. It just made me sick on Sept. 11. I cried when
those towers came down."
A White House review of American defenses in March
2000 found significant shortcomings in nearly a decade of
government efforts to improve defenses against terrorists
at home. The F.B.I. and the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, it said, should begin "high tempo,
ongoing operations to arrest, detain and deport potential
sleeper cells in the United States."
The review called for the government to greatly expand its
antiterrorism efforts inside the United States, creating an
additional dozen joint federal-local task forces like the one
that had been set up in New York.
The review identified particular weaknesses in the
nation's immigration controls, officials said. The
government remained unable to track foreigners in the
United States on student visas, despite a 1996 law passed
after the first World Trade Center bombing that required it
to do so.
In June 2000, after the millennium plot was revealed, the
National Commission on Terrorism recommended that the
immigration service set up a system to keep tabs on
foreign students. Academic institutions opposed the
recommendation, fearing that a strict reporting
requirement might alienate prospective foreign students,
according to government officials. Nothing changed.
As the commission was completing its work, the Sept. 11
hijackers began entering the United States. One of the 19
hijackers, Hani Hanjour, who had traveled on a student
visa, failed to show up for school and remained in the
country illegally.
The F.B.I. had some problems of its own. It had no
intelligence warning of an attack on Los Angeles
International Airport, which investigators eventually
learned was Mr. Ressam's intended target.
Beginning in 1997, senior officials at the bureau had
begun to rethink their approach to terrorism, viewing it
now as a crime to be prevented rather than solved. But it
was the millennium plot that revealed how ill equipped
the bureau was to radically shift its culture, former
officials say.
It lacked informers within terrorist groups. It did not have
the computer and analytical capacity for integrating
disparate pieces of information.
"We did not have any actionable intelligence," one senior
official said. "We were flying blind."
In March 2000, Dale L. Watson, the F.B.I.'s assistant
director for counterterrorism, started a series of seminars
with agents who headed the bureau's 56 field offices.
Each field office was required to establish a joint terrorism
task force with local police departments, modeled after the
arrangement begun in New York in the mid-1980's. Field
office chiefs were also told to hire more Arabic translators
and develop better sources of information.
Mr. Watson said that the meetings were a centerpiece of
efforts to shore up the bureau's counterterrorism work
that had begun several years earlier. The meetings, he
said, were "designed to bring every office, no matter how
small, to the same top terrorism capacities resident in our
larger offices like New York."
The F.B.I. renewed its push on Capitol Hill for money to
create a computer system that would allow various field
offices to share and analyze information collected by
agents. Until late last year, Congress had refused to pay
for the project.
Without the analytical aid of a computer system, Mr.
Bryant said, the bureau's counterterrorism program
would be hobbled, particularly if the goal was to avert a
crime. "We didn't know what we had," he said. "We didn't
know what we knew."
Overseas, the Clinton administration searched for new
ways to obtain the intelligence needed to attack Mr. bin
Laden. In September 2000, an unarmed, unmanned spy
plane called the Predator flew test flights over
Afghanistan, providing what several administration
officials called incomparably detailed real-time video and
photographs of the movements of what appeared to be Mr.
bin Laden and his aides.
The White House pressed ahead with a program to arm
the Predator with a missile, but the effort was slowed by
bureaucratic infighting between the Pentagon and the
C.I.A. over who would pay for the craft and who would
have ultimate authority over its use. The dispute, officials
said, was not resolved until after Sept. 11.
On Oct. 12, an explosive-laden dinghy piloted by two
suicide bombers exploded next to the American destroyer
Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. Intelligence analysts
linked the bombing to Al Qaeda, but at a series of
Cabinet-level meetings, Mr. Tenet of the C.I.A. and senior
F.B.I. officials said the case was not conclusive.
Mr. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism director,
had no doubts about whom to punish. In late October,
officials said, he put on the table an idea he had been
pushing for some time: bombing Mr. bin Laden's largest
training camps in Afghanistan.
With the administration locked in a fevered effort to
broker a peace settlement in Israel, an election imminent
and the two- term Clinton administration coming to a
close, the recommendation went nowhere. Terrorism was
not raised as an issue by either Vice President Al Gore or
George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign.
In October 2000, the administration took another shot at
killing Mr. bin Laden. When Mr. Berger called the
president to tell him the effort had failed, he recalled, Mr.
Clinton cursed. "Just keep trying," he said.
The New Team
Seeing the Threat But Moving Slowly
As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger
met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a
warning.
According to both of them, he said that terrorism - and
particularly Mr. bin Laden's brand of it - would consume
far more of her time than she had ever imagined.
A month later, with the administration still getting
organized, Mr. Tenet, whom President Bush had asked to
stay on at the C.I.A., warned the Senate Intelligence
Committee that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda remained
"the most immediate and serious threat" to security. But
until Sept. 11, the people at the top levels of the Bush
administration may, if anything, have been less
preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.
At the C.I.A., according to former Clinton administration
officials, Mr. Tenet's actions did not match his words. For
example, one intelligence official said, the C.I.A. station in
Pakistan remained understaffed and underfinanced,
though the C.I.A. denied that.
In March, the White House's Counterterrorism Security
Group began drafting its own strategy for combating Al
Qaeda. Mr. Clarke was still nominally in charge, but Bush
aides were on the way to approving Mr. Clarke's
recommendation that his group be divided into several
new offices.
Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss
terrorism in late spring when intercepts from Afghanistan
warned that Al Qaeda was planning to attack an American
target in late June or perhaps over the July 4 holiday.
They did not meet even after intelligence analysts
overheard conversations from a Qaeda cell in Milan
suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's agents might be plotting
to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting in
Genoa, Italy, in late July.
Administration officials say the president was concerned
about the growing threat and frustrated by the
halfhearted efforts to thwart Al Qaeda. In July, Ms. Rice
said, Mr. Bush likened the response to the Qaeda threat
to "swatting at flies." He said he wanted a plan to "bring
this guy down."
The administration's draft plan for fighting Al Qaeda
included a $200 million C.I.A. program that, among other
things, would arm the Taliban's enemies. Clinton
administration officials had refused to provide significant
money and arms to the Northern Alliance, which was
composed mostly of ethnic minorities. Officials feared that
large-scale support for the rebels would involve the United
States too deeply in a civil war and anger Pakistan.
President Bush's national security advisers approved the
plan on Sept. 4, a senior administration official said, and
it was to be presented to the president on Sept. 10.
(However, the leader of the Northern Alliance was
assassinated by Qaeda agents on Sept. 9.) Mr. Bush was
traveling on Sept. 10 and did not receive it.
The next day his senior national security aides gathered
shortly before 9 a.m. for a staff meeting. At roughly the
same moment, a hijacked Boeing 767 was plowing into
the north tower of the World Trade Center.
This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and
Don Van Natta Jr. and written by Ms. Miller.
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