The Secret History
By Michael Elliott
TIME.com
Long before 9/11, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda.
It didn't happen--and soon it was too late.
-- The saga of a lost chance
Sunday, 4 August, 2002
Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted
empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they
are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance
may have been missed even by those who took part in it.
One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001.
The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who
wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as
possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by
the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series
of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.
Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by
international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to
underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told
her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda
specifically, than any other subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career
bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become
the White House's point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group
(CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind.
Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he
had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that
he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the
principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left
in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would
be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton
aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put
together.
Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to
Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against
al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a
more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said
she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush
administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the
heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's
proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support
for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities
stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given
aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in
Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was
being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a
sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had
pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last
remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have
been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time,
the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of
special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of
dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've
done since 9/11."
And that's the point. The proposals Clarke developed in the winter of 2000-01 were not given another
hearing by top decision makers until late April, and then spent another four months making their laborious
way through the bureaucracy before they were readied for approval by President Bush. It is quite true that
nobody predicted Sept. 11-that nobody guessed in advance how and when the attacks would come. But
other things are true too. By last summer, many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down
bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a
major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a
systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat.
The winter proposals became a victim of the transition process, turf wars and time spent on the pet
policies of new top officials. The Bush Administration chose to institute its own "policy review process" on
the terrorist threat. Clarke told Time that the review moved "as fast as could be expected." And
Administration officials insist that by the time the review was endorsed by the Bush principals on Sept. 4, it
was more aggressive than anything contemplated the previous winter. The final plan, they say, was
designed not to "roll back" al-Qaeda but to "eliminate" it. But that delay came at a cost. The Northern
Alliance was desperate for help but got little of it. And in a bureaucratic squabble that would be farfetched
on The West Wing, nobody in Washington could decide whether a Predator drone-an unmanned aerial
vehicle (UAV) and the best possible source of real intelligence on what was happening in the terror
camps-should be sent to fly over Afghanistan. So the Predator sat idle from October 2000 until after Sept.
11. No single person was responsible for all this. But "Washington"-that organic compound of officials and
politicians, in uniform and out, with faces both familiar and unknown-failed horribly.
Could al-Qaeda's plot have been foiled if the U.S. had taken the fight to the terrorists in January 2001?
Perhaps not. The thrust of the winter plan was to attack al-Qaeda outside the U.S. Yet by the beginning of
that year, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, two Arabs who had been leaders of a terrorist cell in
Hamburg, Germany, were already living in Florida, honing their skills in flight schools. Nawaf Alhazmi and
Khalid Almihdhar had been doing the same in Southern California. The hijackers maintained tight security,
generally avoided cell phones, rented apartments under false names and used cash-not wire
transfers-wherever possible. If every plan to attack al-Qaeda had been executed, and every lead explored,
Atta's team might still never have been caught.
But there's another possibility. An aggressive campaign to degrade the terrorist network worldwide-to
shut down the conveyor belt of recruits coming out of the Afghan camps, to attack the financial and
logistical support on which the hijackers depended-just might have rendered it incapable of carrying out the
Sept. 11 attacks. Perhaps some of those who had to approve the operation might have been killed, or the
money trail to Florida disrupted. We will never know, because we never tried. This is the secret history of
that failure.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Berger was determined that when he left office, Rice should have a full understanding of the terrorist
threat. In a sense, this was an admission of failure. For the Clinton years had been marked by a drumbeat
of terror attacks against American targets, and they didn't seem to be stopping.
In 1993 the World Trade Center had been bombed for the first time; in 1996 19 American servicemen
had been killed when the Khobar Towers, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was bombed; two years later,
American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked. As the millennium celebrations at the end of
1999 approached, the CIA warned that it expected five to 15 attacks against American targets over the New
Year's weekend. But three times, the U.S. got lucky. The Jordanians broke up an al-Qaeda cell in Amman;
Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian based in Montreal, panicked when stopped at a border crossing from Canada
while carrying explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport; and on Jan. 3, 2000, an al-Qaeda
attack on the U.S.S. The Sullivans in Yemen foundered after terrorists overloaded their small boat.
From the start of the Clinton Administration, the job of thwarting terror had fallen to Clarke. A
bureaucratic survivor who now leads the Bush Administration's office on cyberterrorism, he has served four
Presidents from both parties-staff members joke that the framed photos in his office have two sides, one for
a Republican President to admire, the other for a Democrat. Aggressive and legendarily abrasive, Clarke
was desperate to persuade skeptics to take the terror threat as seriously as he did. "Clarke is unbelievably
determined, high-energy, focused and imaginative," says a senior Clinton Administration official. "But he's
totally insensitive to rolling over others who are in his way." By the end of 2000, Clarke didn't need to roll
over his boss; Berger was just as sure of the danger.
The two men had an ally in George Tenet, who had been appointed Director of Central Intelligence in
1997. "He wasn't sleeping on the job on this," says a senior Clinton aide of Tenet, "whatever inherent
problems there were in the agency." Those problems were immense. Although the CIA claims it had
penetrated al-Qaeda, Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, chairman of the House
Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, doubts that it ever got anywhere near the
top of the organization. "The CIA," he says, "were not able to recruit human assets to penetrate al-Qaeda
and the al-Qaeda leadership." Nobody pretends that such an exercise would have been easy. Says a
counterterrorism official: "Where are you going to find a person loyal to the U.S. who's willing to eat dung
beetles and sleep on the ground in a cave for two or three years? You don't find people willing to do that
who also speak fluent Pashtu or Arabic."
In the absence of men sleeping with the beetles, the CIA had to depend on less reliable allies. The
agency attempted to recruit tribal leaders in Afghanistan who might be persuaded to take on bin Laden;
contingency plans had been made for the CIA to fly one of its planes to a desert landing strip in
Afghanistan if he was ever captured. (Clinton had signed presidential "findings" that were ambiguous on the
question of whether bin Laden could be killed in such an attack.) But the tribal groups' loyalty was always
in doubt. Despite the occasional abortive raid, they never seemed to get close to bin Laden. That meant
that the Clinton team had to fall back on a second strategy: taking out bin Laden by cruise missile, which
had been tried after the embassy bombings in 1998. For all of 2000, sources tell Time, Clinton ordered two
U.S. Navy submarines to stay on station in the northern Arabian Sea, ready to attack if bin Laden's
coordinates could be determined.
But the plan was twice flawed. First, the missiles could be used only if bin Laden's whereabouts were
known, and the CIA never definitively delivered that information. By early 2000, Clinton was becoming
infuriated by the lack of intelligence on bin Laden's movements. "We've got to do better than this," he
scribbled on one memo. "This is unsatisfactory." Second, even if a target could ever be found, the missiles
might take too long to hit it. The Pentagon thought it could dump a Tomahawk missile on bin Laden's camp
within six hours of a decision to attack, but the experts in the White House thought that was impossibly
long. Any missiles fired at Afghanistan would have to fly over Pakistan, and Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence agency (ISI) was close to the Taliban. White House aides were sure bin Laden would be tipped
off as soon as the Pakistanis detected the missiles.
Berger and Clarke wanted something more robust. On Nov. 7, Berger met with William Cohen, then
Secretary of Defense, in the Pentagon. The time had come, said Berger, for the Pentagon to rethink its
approach to operations against bin Laden. "We've been hit many times, and we'll be hit again," Berger said.
"Yet we have no option beyond cruise missiles." He wanted "boots on the ground"-U.S. special-ops forces
deployed inside Afghanistan on a search-and-destroy mission targeting bin Laden. Cohen said he would
look at the idea, but he and General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were dead set
against it. They feared a repeat of Desert One, the 1980 fiasco in which special-ops commandos crashed in
Iran during an abortive mission to rescue American hostages.
It wasn't just Pentagon nerves that got in the way of a more aggressive counterterrorism policy. So did
politics. After the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, the secretive Joint Special Operations Command at Fort
Bragg, N.C., drew up plans to have Delta Force members swoop into Afghanistan and grab bin Laden. But
the warriors were never given the go-ahead; the Clinton Administration did not order an American retaliation
for the attack. "We didn't do diddly," gripes a counterterrorism official. "We didn't even blow up a baby-milk
factory." In fact, despite strong suspicion that bin Laden was behind the attack in Yemen, the CIA and FBI
had not officially concluded that he was, and would be unable to do so before Clinton left office. That made
it politically impossible for Clinton to strike-especially given the upcoming election and his own lack of
credibility on national security. "If we had done anything, say, two weeks before the election," says a
former senior Clinton aide, "we'd be accused of helping Al Gore."
For Clarke, the bombing of the Cole was final proof that the old policy hadn't worked. It was time for
something more aggressive-a plan to make war against al-Qaeda. One element was vital. The Taliban's
control of Afghanistan was not yet complete; in the northeast of the country, Northern Alliance forces led by
Ahmed Shah Massoud, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought against the Soviet invaders of
Afghanistan in the 1980s, were still resisting Taliban rule. Clarke argued that Massoud should be given the
resources to develop a viable fighting force. That way, terrorists leaving al-Qaeda's training camps in
Afghanistan would have been forced to join the Taliban forces fighting in the north. "You keep them on the
front lines in Afghanistan," says a counterterrorism official. "Hopefully you're killing them in the process,
and they're not leaving Afghanistan to plot terrorist operations. That was the general approach." But the
approach meant that Americans had to engage directly in the snake pit of Afghan politics.
PART I
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