The inside story of how U.S. terrorist hunters are going after al Qaeda
Cover Story 6/2/03
Playing Offense
By David E. Kaplan
"After 9/11, the gloves come off."
–COFER BLACK, former director, CIA Counterterrorism Center
And the brass knuckles came on. America's frontline agents in the war on terror have hacked into foreign banks, used secret prisons overseas, and spent over $20 million bankrolling friendly Muslim intelligence services. They have assassinated al Qaeda leaders, spirited prisoners to nations with brutal human-rights records, and amassed files equal to a thousand encyclopedias.
But the war is far from over. Last week, Osama bin Laden's top deputy exhorted the faithful to strike at western embassies and businesses. The injunction, from Ayman al-Zawahiri, came on the heels of bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia and caused the United States to close diplomatic posts overseas and increase the homeland security warning level from yellow to orange. Al Qaeda, one FBI veteran explained, "has one more 9/11 in them."
With all the headlines about the latest attacks and warnings, however, it is easy to miss the amount of damage America's terrorist hunters have inflicted on bin Laden's ragtag army. U.S. News has retraced the war on terror, starting in the very first weeks after 9/11, to examine in detail how Washington and its allies launched an unprecedented drive, led by the Central Intelligence Agency, to disrupt and destroy bin Laden's operation. Interviews were conducted with over three dozen past and current counterterrorism officials in a half-dozen countries; the magazine also reviewed thousands of pages of court records and analytical reports.
The story--part detective yarn, part spy tale--is one of unsung heroes. It is a story of nameless CIA analysts who matched tortured renditions of Arabic names with cellphone numbers around the globe, of Pakistani soldiers killed while smashing down doors of al Qaeda, of Jordanian interrogators who wore down some of bin Laden's craftiest killers. Much of this has not been told before. A windfall of intelligence has led to a newer, more profound understanding of bin Laden's secret network, intelligence officials say. They have built up dossiers on his followers from a scant few hundred before 9/11 to over 3,000 today. They have identified the core group's sworn membership, now thought to number only 180 true believers. And bin Laden's personal fortune, investigators say, is all but gone.
There's more. The investigators have unearthed a secret history of al Qaeda, discovering documents in bin Laden's own hand, along with records identifying donors to the terrorist group. They have forced captured operatives to help target their comrades--even listening in as a terrorist made a phone call that led to the assassination of a top al Qaeda leader.
On the run. Al Qaeda's wounds run deep. Over half of its key operational leaders are out of action, officials tell U.S. News. Its top leaders are increasingly isolated and on the run. Al Qaeda's Afghan sanctuary is largely gone. Its military commander is dead. Its chief of operations sits in prison, as do some 3,000 associates around the world. In the field, every attempt at communication now puts operatives at risk. The organization's once bountiful finances, meanwhile, have become precarious. One recent intercept revealed a terrorist pleading for $80, sources say.
If the global war on terror has a nerve center, it is the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. At first glance, the CTC looks unremarkable, packed with the cubicles, gray desks, and desktop PCs that make up just about any government office in Washington. A hint that its work might be somewhat out of the ordinary is offered by signposts that mark the corridors. One well-trodden intersection lies at the crossroads of Bin Laden Lane and Saddam Street.
The 9/11 attacks severely shook the CTC--staffed, at the time, by some 600 case officers, analysts, and support personnel. "There was real shock," remembers one official. "Our sole job was to stop things like this." Cofer Black had taken the top CTC job two years before 9/11. A near-legendary figure around the CIA, he had spent 26 years in the agency's covert operations division. But as he stared at the expressions on his staff's faces, he was struck by a look he'd seen only overseas. They reminded him of peering into the eyes of Israeli intelligence officials--how haunted and driven they were. "You appreciate the gravity of your situation when your own people are in the kill box," he says. Black knew al Qaeda well. He had chased Osama bin Laden ever since the Saudi exile tried to kill him in Sudan a decade earlier. Black had returned the favor, drafting CIA plans to assassinate bin Laden long before 9/11--plans that, on the order of higher-ups, sat on the shelf.
All that changed after 9/11. Within days, Black's team came up with its answer to al Qaeda. They called it the Worldwide Attack Matrix. It was an operational war plan, a no-holds-barred leap back to the agency's heyday of covert action. As detailed in Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, the Matrix called for a worldwide campaign to root out its cells in 80 countries. Intelligence officials confirmed to U.S. News the dramatic scope of the Matrix and related proposals. The new plans authorized the use of deadly force, break-ins, and psychological warfare. They allowed the CIA to pour millions of dollars into friendly Arab intelligence services and permitted the once gun-shy agency to work with any government--no matter how unsavory--as long as it got results. On September 17, six days after the attack, President Bush signed an executive order approving virtually everything the CIA had asked for.
Job 1 was destroying the terrorists' Afghan sanctuary. "Nothing emboldened al Qaeda more than us not going after them," says Michael Rolince, who ran the FBI's international terrorism section during 9/11. "I sat through hundreds of meetings at which DOD [the Department of Defense] just listened. The people who fought wars had no role in the war on terror." That was about to change.
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