Playing Offense - The inside story of how U.S. terrorist hunters are going after al Qaeda
By David E. Kaplan
"After 9/11, the gloves come off."
- COFER BLACK, former director, CIA Counterterrorism Center
"US NEWS" cover story. I have read a lot of "put downs" here about our Terrorist effort. Here is how we got, and are continuing to get, Al Qaeda.
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.
<a><img></a>
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.
"Like the Nazis." The war in Afghanistan caught al Qaeda's leaders off guard. Bin Laden's top people were convinced the United States would respond to 9/11 with merely a volley of cruise missiles, interrogations later showed. By late 2001, the U.S.-led assault had taken out al Qaeda's camps and headquarters, killed hundreds of its followers, and driven the Taliban from power. So rapid was the advance that bin Laden's operatives left behind a motherlode of intelligence--address books, videos, computers, and more. Nearly 100 places yielded valuable intelligence, from caves to training centers. Among the key finds: rosters of trainees at al Qaeda facilities, which gave the CIA a handle on the tens of thousands of jihadists who had passed through some 50 camps across Afghanistan." They were like the Nazis," says an FBI terror expert. "They were meticulous record keepers."
One of the richest finds came in November, after a CIA Predator--a remote-controlled drone-tracked dozens of the enemy to a hotel outside Kabul. A U.S. airstrike blew the building apart, killing close to 100, including Mohammed Atef, al Qaeda's longtime military commander and a key planner of the 9/11 and U.S. Embassy attacks in Africa. Investigators also found in the rubble scores of documents and videotapes that would spark alerts in a half-dozen countries. The videos featured five would-be martyrs railing against "infidels" and vowing to die in suicide attacks. Analysts soon recognized one of them: 30-year-old Ramzi Binalshibh, a glib young Yemeni whose hopes to join the 9/11 hijackers were thwarted by visa problems. Binalshibh was nabbed in Pakistan months later. But another--Khaled Jehani--surfaced only last month in Saudi Arabia, blamed as the mastermind of the suicide car bombings in Riyadh.
From the rubble came another video, one revealing assassination plots against leaders at an upcoming Persian Gulf summit. U.S. officials pulled faces off the tape of some 45 al Qaeda operatives. Also in the ruins: a German passport in the name of one Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a fugitive thought to have recruited the Hamburg, Germany, cell members behind 9/11. Investigators soon caught up to Zammar in Morocco. But perhaps the biggest find was yet another video--a homemade, 20-minute surveillance tape of Singapore. The tape helped officials there thwart an extraordinary series of plots by Jamaat Islamiya--al Qaeda's key ally in Southeast Asia. The militants hoped to spark a holy war by bombing U.S. military sites and businesses, diplomatic posts, and the city's subway and water supply.
The intelligence "take" from the Kabul hotel and other sites was quickly crated up and shipped to the CTC for a closer look. Once considered a backwater at the CIA, the CTC now stood at the heart of the biggest surge of covert action since the Cold War. Cofer Black found himself overseeing secret operations, paramilitary units, propaganda efforts, and more. In the weeks after 9/11, the CTC nearly doubled in size to over 1,100 people, including FBI agents, military officers, and CIA operatives. Before 9/11, the CTC had focused on a dozen different terrorist groups; it now restructured to zero in almost exclusively on al Qaeda. New teams concentrated on finances, leadership, collection of intelligence, and work with foreign governments. Analysts sorted through reams of field reports, satellite photos, and electronic intercepts. Link-analysis printouts, some as big as bedsheets, lined the walls of cubicles, as researchers charted al Qaeda's far-flung contacts. "There are subnetworks of subnetworks," says a top intelligence official. "Thank God we've got giant printers."
By late November, the amount of intelligence pouring in was overwhelming, and CTC staffers understood why. For years, their efforts at fighting terror had vied with a dozen other priorities of U.S. foreign policy. But the message from Washington now was clear. "No nation can be neutral in this conflict," declared President Bush. "You're either with us or you're against us." The results were immediate. "Before 9/11, the cooperation was halfhearted," recalls Richard Clarke, the top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council at the time of the attack. "But now everyone knew the president had a blank check to do whatever he wanted." From the Indian government came intercepts of al Qaeda-tied militants in Kashmir; from Italy, wiretapped conversations of Islamic radicals in Milan; from Sudan, long-awaited files on bin Laden operatives once headquartered in Khartoum. Much to the delight of old pros at the CIA, intelligence arrived even from old foes, among them Libya and Syria.
Bits and pieces. Each day, the CTC took in some 2,500 cables from CIA stations overseas; each week, some 17,000 new bits of intelligence arrived. And that didn't count the huge hauls from Afghanistan. One veteran case officer said the amounts were measured "literally in terabytes"--a terabyte is roughly equal to a thousand bound editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The CTC had become the world's single largest collector and coordinator for intelligence on terrorism. So large is the volume of material collected, sources tell U.S. News, that even today, substantial amounts remain unexamined.
By March 2002, the intelligence windfall revealed how little U.S. intelligence had understood about al Qaeda. "There were tremendous gaps in our understanding of al Qaeda's structure, its chain of command, its operational network," says Roger Cressey, director for transnational threats at the National Security Council at the time of 9/11. "Think of it as a 1,000-piece jigsaw in which we had maybe 200 pieces. After 9/11, the pieces came fast and furious."
America's best analysts were troubled as they surveyed the new intelligence. "It was even worse than we thought," says Black, who was struck by Afghan reports of dead al Qaeda fighters with blond hair and blue eyes--Chechens--as well as Uzbeks, Indonesians, and Chinese. "They had internationalized themselves to a far greater degree," he says, "and it was all networked really well."
The body kills, the seized computers and correspondence, combined with prisoner interrogations and other intelligence, offered a fairly complete portrait of bin Laden's secretive organization. Analysts began to grasp how al Qaeda actually operated, from its finances to its key personnel. Before 9/11, U.S. intelligence had files on only a few hundred al Qaeda-trained Islamists. But by March, the number had ballooned to 3,000 and was growing daily.
As their knowledge increased, analysts learned to differentiate among the varied bands of jihadists. As one counterterrorism veteran explained, there are, in effect, two al Qaedas: One is al Qaeda the ideology, which fuels a sprawling network of radical Islamists who draw inspiration from bin Laden but are not his direct disciples. Within that network are what analysts have called al Qaeda's franchises--allied radical groups from Uzbekistan to Indonesia who share bin Laden's dream of a pan-Islamist world. But there is also al Qaeda the organization--a finite, disciplined, Mafia-like grouping with its own rules, finances, and "made" members. Although tens of thousands went through its training camps, very few in fact joined the group. "Al Qaeda is an elite organization that takes very few members," explains Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al Qaeda. U.S. intelligence soon concluded that only some 180 followers had sworn bayat, or allegiance, to bin Laden.
The group was also more hierarchical than the CIA had believed. Bin Laden, once thought to be a figurehead, turned out to be a hands-on leader who approved al Qaeda's most ambitious attacks, including 9/11. Descriptions of the group's inner workings, with its religious dogma and blind obedience, appeared almost cultlike, with bin Laden cast as guru. As one top official put it, bin Laden seemed "more Koresh than Napoleon"--a reference to Branch Davidian cultist David Koresh, who perished with his followers in a fiery death in Waco, Texas.
Al Qaeda's finances came into sharper focus, too. Estimates of bin Laden's wealth after 9/11--cited as high as $300 million--turned out to be wildly exaggerated. The Saudi heir had squandered his fortune years before. Al Qaeda's finances were, instead, built on a foundation of charities, mosques, fund-raisers, and businesses that had financed the jihad movement since its formative war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. CIA officers were joined by Treasury and FBI agents in tracing how al Qaeda moved its money--through international banks, hawala underground bankers, and the purchase of commodities like gold and gemstones.
For years, U.S. officials suspected al Qaeda's key support moved through a network of Islamic charities, most of them based in Saudi Arabia and tied to influential Saudis. The evidence of this was now damning. The CIA's interrogations of al Qaeda's top man in Southeast Asia revealed how the group used funds from the Saudi-based al Haramain Islamic Foundation. The Afghan offices of another Saudi outfit, al Wafa Humanitarian Organization, allegedly functioned as an al Qaeda subsidiary--until it was bombed by U.S. warplanes.
Even after 9/11, the Saudis proved less than cooperative. Frustrated, the CIA took matters into its own hands, hacking into Middle Eastern bank accounts to chart the flow of funds to al Qaeda operatives, intelligence sources tell U.S. News. Other times, case officers offered bribes and came away with bank statements and account numbers. By early March last year, U.S. officials had frozen the assets of a half-dozen foundations and urged other nations to do the same. On March 19, Bosnian authorities raided eight locations tied to the Benevolence International Foundation, a multimillion-dollar Islamic fund with offices in nine countries. Inside, officials found weapons and explosives, pilfered government documents on terrorism, plus videos and literature calling for holy war and martyrdom. But the real surprise lay within a sole computer at the foundation's Sarajevo office.
It was a file directory like that on any other PC, except this one was marked Tareekh Osama, Arabic for "Osama's History." As they peered inside, investigators were stunned. The contents were no less than al Qaeda's founding documents: scanned letters, records of meetings, photographs, and more--some of it in bin Laden's own handwriting.
The files laid bare al Qaeda's history in its own words--how it grew from a network backing anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in the late 1980s into a global crusade against infidels everywhere. There was correspondence about moving weapons, money, and people; an organizational chart; and documents on the group's involvement in the Bosnian and Sudan civil wars in the early 1990s, then in Chechnya, in 1995. In a court filing unsealed in April this year, U.S. prosecutors called the files "a treasure-trove." Of special note was a handwritten list of names, topped by a verse from the Koran--"And spend for God's cause"--followed by 20 wealthy donors to the al Qaeda network, dating apparently from the late '80s. Known as the Golden Chain, the roster included some of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest men: three billionaire bankers, top industrialists, and a former government minister. After each man appeared a second name, in parenthesis, suggesting who received money from the donor. "Osama" appeared after seven entries.
END OF PART ONE |
