Clinton was intent on getting bin laden and al qaeda. Bush dropped the ball as he was intent on invading Iraq to take oil and appease Israel: Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2001; Page A01
First of two articles
Two years ago, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet phoned the White House. The agency had a lead, he said, on Osama bin Laden.
Reports linked the al Qaeda leader to a temporary encampment in southern Afghanistan. Overhead photographs showed a well-equipped caravan of the sort used by hunters, a commanding figure at its center, and an entourage of escorts bearing arms.
National security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger canvassed the Small Group, as they had come to call themselves, of Cabinet-rank decision-makers on the most sensitive terrorist matters. President Bill Clinton gave the go-ahead to begin preparations for cruise missiles to launch.
Amid the urgent engagement of the White House came an unwelcome status call from U.S. Central Command. One of two submarines designated to fire the missiles, if so ordered, had left its Arabian Sea cruising grounds. "Well, get it back in the box!" urged a duty officer, according to a person who was present.
Clinton, said people familiar with the episode, waited impatiently as the CIA searched for confirmation. Finally, Tenet called back. The camp was not bin Laden's, he said. It was a falconing expedition of a wealthy sheik from the United Arab Emirates -- and bin Laden had never been part of it.
Thus dissolved another moment of hope in a covert war of long shots and near misses that most Americans did not yet know their country was fighting. Unfolding in the last two years of his presidency, long before the events of Sept. 11, Clinton's war was marked by caution against an enemy that the president and his advisers knew to be ruthless and bold. Reluctant to risk lives, failure or the wrath of brittle allies in the Islamic world, Clinton confined planning for lethal force within two significant limits. American troops would use weapons aimed from a distance, and their enemy would be defined as individual terrorists, not the providers of sanctuary for attacks against the United States.
Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office.
• In addition to a secret "finding" to authorize covert action, which has been reported before, Clinton signed three highly classified Memoranda of Notification expanding the available tools. In succession, the president authorized killing instead of capturing bin Laden, then added several of al Qaeda's senior lieutenants, and finally approved the shooting down of private civilian aircraft on which they flew.
• The Clinton administration ordered the Navy to maintain two Los Angeles-class attack submarines on permanent station in the nearest available waters, enabling the U.S. military to place Tomahawk cruise missiles on any target in Afghanistan within about six hours of receiving the order.
• Three times after Aug. 20, 1998, when Clinton ordered the only missile strike of his presidency against bin Laden's organization, the CIA came close enough to pinpointing bin Laden that Clinton authorized final preparations to launch. In each case, doubts about the intelligence aborted the mission.
• The CIA's directorate of operations recruited, trained, paid or equipped surrogate forces in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and among tribal militias inside Afghanistan, with the common purpose of capturing or killing bin Laden. The Pakistani channel, disclosed previously in The Washington Post, and its Uzbek counterpart, which has not been reported before, never bore fruit. Inside Afghanistan, tribal allies twice reported to their CIA handlers that they fought skirmishes with bin Laden's forces, but they inflicted no verified damage.
• Operatives of the CIA's Special Activities Division made at least one clandestine entry into Afghanistan in 1999. They prepared a desert airstrip to extract bin Laden, if captured, or to evacuate U.S. tribal allies, if cornered. The Special Collection Service, a joint project of the CIA and the National Security Agency, also slipped into Afghanistan to place listening devices within range of al Qaeda's tactical radios.
The lines Clinton opted not to cross continued to define U.S. policy in his successor's first eight months. Clinton stopped short of using more decisive military instruments, including U.S. ground forces, and declined to expand the reach of the war to the Taliban regime that hosted bin Laden and his fighters after 1996.
Not until the catastrophe of Sept. 11 -- when terrorists used hijacked airliners to destroy the World Trade Center and damage the Pentagon -- did President Bush obliterate those boundaries.
More than once, advisers recall, Clinton sounded out Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the prospect of using Special Forces to surprise bin Laden's fighters on the ground. But Clinton declined to authorize the large-scale operation that Shelton said would be required, and he chose not to order a less ambitious option to which the general would have objected.
Though his government came to believe that the Taliban was inextricably tied to bin Laden, Clinton never seriously entertained the use of military force against the Islamic fundamentalist regime, still less the kind of broad campaign that removed the Taliban from power 10 days ago.
At least twice, Clinton dispatched senior emissaries to the Taliban with threats no less stark than the formula Bush laid out in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20. Bin Laden, they said, was an enemy of the United States, and a regime that provided him sanctuary should be prepared for the consequences.
Clinton administration officials believed the Taliban would interpret the warning as a military threat.
The administration never made good on it. Put baldly, several principal advisers said recently, the political and diplomatic market would not bear such a war.
"Until September 11th," said Karl F. Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, "there was certainly not any groundswell of support to mount a major attack on the Taliban. This is just a reality."
'He's Going to Beat Us Again'
Within days of the August 1998 embassy bombings, the combined efforts of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency pinned responsibility on bin Laden's organization.
With only Attorney General Janet Reno dissenting, Clinton directed two retaliatory strikes on Aug. 20. One, near the Afghan town of Khost, was timed to kill bin Laden and his associates in their beds at 10 p.m. local time. It missed, the CIA said afterward, by a few hours. The other demolished a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that the CIA had linked to attempted production of chemical weapons for bin Laden.
Domestically and globally, Clinton National Security Council staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lamented recently, the missile attack came to be regarded -- wrongly, they argued -- "as the greatest foreign policy blunder of the Clinton presidency." Apart from the "public relations battering," Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's deputy counterterrorism chief at the time, wrote later, the episode inflicted a "broader blow . . . on the perceived integrity of U.S. intelligence and U.S. counterterrorist efforts generally."
Badly burned, Clinton and his national security cabinet turned their emphasis to detecting, disrupting and arresting members of terrorist cells in quiet cooperation with friendly foreign security services. This had been an ongoing project of the FBI and CIA since the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
At the CIA's counterterrorism center in Langley, wall maps the size of Renaissance tapestries depicted the agency's growing knowledge of the al Qaeda network in an intricate web of crisscrossed lines. On occasion Tenet would ask aides to roll them up and carry them, sealed in tubular cases, to brief Clinton or the Small Group in Berger's office.
Beginning in 1996, the Clinton team made increasing use of what Berger described as "a new art form" in the international commerce in terror suspects. Scores of times in the next five years, they persuaded allies to arrest members of al Qaeda and ship them somewhere else. Frequently, somewhere else was not the United States.
Such a transfer without legal process was called "rendition." Most took place in secret and have yet to be disclosed. A State Department accounting of extraditions and renditions in the 1990s, published in April, named only 13. At least 40 more, according to sources, were removed forcibly from one foreign country to another on behalf of the United States.
Most remain unknown. One episode took place in Albania the week after the embassy bombings. After foiling a truck bomb plot against the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, American intelligence officers guided Albanian authorities to five arrests of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members. The Americans flew the five men to Egypt, where they were executed after a military trial.
In one briefing, Tenet said of bin Laden's network that the arrests were "breaking the organization brick by brick," but warned: "He's going to beat us again."
'No Way to Avoid Killing Him'
Clinton never launched another military strike against al Qaeda, but he invoked his authority as commander in chief to prosecute a subterranean campaign that intensified through the remainder of his presidency.
Immediately after the embassy bombings, he issued a "finding" under the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Amendment enabling intelligence agencies to fund covert operations against bin Laden. The finding's primary directive was to track and capture the al Qaeda leader, though it authorized use of lethal force in the attempt.
Within months Clinton amended the finding three times, using a form of presidential authority known as a Memorandum of Notification. Each was classified as sensitive compartmented information, Top Secret/Codeword.
The first change, almost immediate, was to broaden the authority of U.S. officers or their recruited agents to use lethal force, enabling them to engage bin Laden and the fighters around him without any prospect of taking him into custody.
"It became evident," said a party to the deliberations, "that there was no way to avoid killing him if we were going to go after him, and we shouldn't worry about it."
Clinton's second Memorandum of Notification expanded the target of the covert campaign. It named a handful of close lieutenants -- sources said fewer than 10 -- to be captured or killed if found separately from bin Laden.
As the hunt progressed, national security officials began to worry that bin Laden might flee Afghanistan. Some State Department officials believed fissures in the Taliban might drive him out, and bin Laden told an ABC News producer on Dec. 28, 1998, that "when a Muslim migrates repeatedly, he is doubly rewarded."
"We just decided early on that he wasn't going to get out of Afghanistan if we could help it," said an official familiar with the discussions. Bin Laden was believed to have helicopters at his disposal, and "there was also a concern he could get a Gulfstream" jet.
Berger and Tenet brought Clinton a third Memorandum of Notification. Clinton signed off on direct authority to shoot down private aircraft in which bin Laden traveled. Because such a flight would probably be deemed civil aviation in international law, and people unconnected to bin Laden might die, this was regarded in the White House as a significant step.
The CIA did not give up entirely on capturing bin Laden. Later in 1999, the Directorate of Operations dispatched a covert reconnaissance mission to a disused southern desert airstrip in Afghanistan. Flying fast and low, and departing undetected after a ground survey, the specialized team assessed the characteristics of the airstrip and its facilities to design a detailed plan for securing the perimeter.
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