I'm from the Government and I'm Here to Kill You Page 14

  CHAPTER 6

  LOOKING FOR TERROR IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

  I want an answer from a named FBI group chief for the record on these questions, several of which I have been asking since a week and a half ago…. If this guy is let go, two years from now he will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House.

  —Unnamed CIA agent, speaking of Zacarias Moussaoui, 9/11’s “twentieth hijacker,” 20011

  Whatever has happened to this—someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain “problems.” Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden] is getting the most “protection.”

  —Unnamed FBI agent, quoted by the 9/11 Commission, 20012

  During the year 2000 and beyond, The Turner Diaries will be an inspiration for right-wing terrorist groups because it predicts both a revolutionary takeover of the government and a race war…. To understand many religious extremists, it is crucial to know the origin of the Book of Revelation …

  —FBI publication, Project Megiddo, an FBI Strategic Assessment of the Potential for Domestic Terrorism, 1999

  THE ROAD TO 9/11 WAS LONG and wandering; it began more than a decade before aircraft hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, at a time when the terrorist organization al-Qaeda was about five years old. The distinguishing features of its early growth were repeated attacks upon Americans and feeble responses by the U.S. government.

  FEBRUARY 1993: TRUCK BOMB EXPLODES IN THE WORLD TRADE CENTER, SIX KILLED

  A decade before the attack on the World Trade Center, terrorists made an unsuccessful attempt to destroy it with explosives. Just after noon on February 26, 1993, a truck bomb laden with half a ton of home-brewed urea nitrate explosive was detonated in the parking garage beneath the north tower; its creators hoped to topple that tower into the south tower and kill thousands. The explosion penetrated five stories of the garage, killing six and injuring more than a thousand people.

  The government’s immediate response was unimpressive. President Clinton began his next radio address with “Good morning. Before I talk with you about our economic program this morning, I want to say a word to the good people of New York and all Americans who’ve been so deeply affected by the tragedy that struck Manhattan yesterday.” He devoted twelve sentences to the subject before going into his economic proposals.3

  OCTOBER 1993: SOMALIA, EIGHTEEN AMERICANS KILLED

  While the events in Somalia were irregular warfare rather than terrorism, terrorists were involved and the outcome played a role in the evolution of anti-American terror. Whatever had passed for government in Somalia had vanished by 1992, with the countryside falling under the control of bands of feuding clans. Famine followed in the wake of the breakdown. The United Nations committed mostly American military forces to ensure the delivery of food and other humanitarian aid.

  “Mission creep” set in, and soon protecting the food deliveries became a much more extensive project of “nation building.” The UN persuaded itself that outside forces would somehow unite the warring Somali clans and would create a modern liberal democracy out of this less-than-promising political material.

  The most powerful of the clans, led by one Mohamed Aidid, resisted the plan, and soon the UN/U.S. forces were implementing a plan to capture Aidid by helicopter assault. The now-famous terrorist Osama bin Laden was aiding Aidid’s men and, had in particular, sent an advisor who had worked out how the ubiquitous RPG-7 antitank missile launcher could be used against helicopters once they stopped to hover.4

  The outcome was well documented in the book and movie Blackhawk Down: Aidid’s men noted that Americans launched every raid in the same way, with elite troops rappelling down from hovering helicopters. They laid an ambush, giving the Americans a false tip that Aidid would attend a meeting at a certain location in the capital, Mogadishu.

  A Blackhawk helicopter, hovering while its combat team rappelled down to the objective, was downed by an RPG-7 hit. A Combat Search and Rescue team descended to rescue and protect the survivors. Another helicopter was downed and a third was damaged by RPG rockets. Armed mobs overran some of the defenders before relief forces broke through after an eleven-hour battle. Twenty-one UN troops, including eighteen Americans soldiers, were killed and seventy-three Americans were wounded. The scene was a disaster of poor intelligence and brave men.

  Four days later, President Clinton announced all American troops would be withdrawn from Somalia by the end of March, some five months away. Relative stability would come after Aidid was killed in combat and succeeded by his son, Hussein Farrah Aidid, a U.S. marine and veteran of Operation Desert Storm.5

  Bin Laden thought he found a lesson in the outcome of the brief fight. As he would later write:

  It cleared from Muslim minds the myth of superpowers. After leaving Afghanistan the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war, thinking the Americans were like the Russians. Our boys were surprised by the low morale of the American soldier, and they realized for the first time that the American soldier was just a paper tiger, and after a few blows ran in defeat.6

  JUNE 1996: KHOBAR TOWERS BOMBING KILLS NINETEEN

  Still the Clinton Administration acted as if all were normal. On June 25, 1996, terrorists detonated a truck bomb—variously estimated at containing five thousand or twenty-five thousand pounds of high explosive—outside the Khobar Towers, a military housing complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. The Towers were occupied by American airmen enforcing the “no fly zone” in southern Iraq. Nineteen Americans died and 372 were injured.

  President Clinton announced to the nation:

  The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished. Within a few hours, an FBI team will be on its way to Saudi Arabia to assist in the investigation…. We’re grateful for the professionalism shown by the Saudi authorities and their reaction to this emergency. We are ready to work with them to make sure those responsible are brought to justice.

  Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished.7

  Impressive words, but no action followed. To this day, there is some dispute over whether the terrorists came from the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization or Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. At the time, American sources blamed the Iranian group, so the government’s reaction to Iran will serve as a measure of its determination.

  FBI Director Louis Freeh headed the FBI investigative team. Saudi authorities informed him that they had four Hezbollah suspects in custody; FBI could question them, but protocol required that the President or a close surrogate contact Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and request access. The FBI Director turned to Sandy Berger, the Assistant to the President on National Security Affairs, who was one of the key players in the Clinton Administration. A decade later, Freeh wrote of what followed:

  So for 30 months, I wrote and rewrote the same set of simple talking points for the president, Mr. Berger, and others to press the FBI’s request to go inside a Saudi prison and interview the Khobar bombers. And for 30 months nothing happened. The Saudis reported back to us that the president and Mr. Berger would either fail to raise the matter with the crown prince or raise it without making any request. On one such occasion, our commander in chief instead hit up Prince Abdullah for a contribution to his library. Mr. Berger never once, in the course of the five-year investigation which coincided with his tenure, even asked how the investigation was going.8

  The indifference had a simple explanation:

  While the investigation into the murder of nineteen Americans in an Iranian-backed operation was ongoing, the Clinton administration began a campaign to woo Tehran. It is difficult to warm relations with a regime at the same time as pursuing its connections to terror. So by 1998 the administration appeared prepared to forgive and
forget Khobar Towers…. The administration softened the State Department warning about travel to Iran, waived sanctions against foreign oil firms doing business there, and removed it from the list of major exporters of illegal drugs.9

  In the end, Freeh secured the intervention of former President George H. W. Bush, who persuaded the Saudis at least to allow the FBI to submit questions to be asked the prisoners and to observe the questioning. The results indicated that Iran had planned and executed the attack. When Freeh briefed the White House on the evidence, the main result was a meeting on how to spin the story in the media and on Capitol Hill: “It seemed we were there to manage the issue, not do a damn thing about it.”10 Five years after the bombing, a federal grand jury indicted thirteen persons, none of whom resided in the United States and none of whom have ever been arrested. The killers did indeed “go unpunished.”

  AUGUST 1998: AL-QAEDA BOMBS U.S. EMBASSIES IN KENYA AND TANZANIA, KILLING TWELVE

  Truck bombs hit U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998. Describing the attacks as “abhorrent,” President Clinton promised: “We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes.”11

  Two weeks later, Tomahawk cruise missiles struck a factory in Sudan and an alleged al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. The factory was vaguely suspected of making nerve gas. The factory had been included because the White House desired to hit targets in two different countries since bin Laden had hit embassies in two different countries. Immediately after the raids, the White House announced: “Our forces targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It contained key elements of the Bin Laden network’s infrastructure and has served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe.”12

  Twenty-six persons were killed at the training camps, most of whom were probably of low rank. The crude structures that were knocked down were made of mud brick, planks, and stones; at a million dollars apiece, the eighty cruise missiles certainly cost more than any structural damage they inflicted. “‘What you told bin Laden,’ says Mike Rolince, former chief of the international terrorism division of the FBI, ‘is that he could go in and level two embassies, and in response we’re going to knock down a few huts.’”13

  That overpriced “retribution” was followed by a still more desultory affair. Sudanese intelligence had become suspicious of two Pakistanis who entered the country after having traveled in places that were popular with Islamist terrorists—now the two wanted to rent an apartment facing the American Embassy in Sudan. Arrested and grilled, the two admitted they were paymasters for al-Qaeda cells in Sudan and had planned to attack the Embassy. Sudanese officials recorded the confessions, had them translated into English, and asked the FBI to send an agent to Sudan to get the interesting evidence.

  After months of waiting for an FBI agent, Sudan sent the two terrorists back to Pakistan. Later, the FBI blamed the State Department for not approving the travel, and the State Department blamed the FBI.

  OCTOBER 2000: AL-QAEDA BOMBS THE USS COLE: SEVENTEEN DEAD

  On October 12, 2000, the Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole was being refueled in Yemen’s Aden Harbor when terrorists detonated an explosive-filled boat alongside her. The blast blew a forty-by-sixty-foot hole in the American destroyer’s side, killing seventeen sailors and injuring thirty-nine.

  President Clinton announced, “If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable.”14 Yemeni authorities did arrest several individuals and sentenced two to death for their role; they later escaped from prison. A third was captured by the United States and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains.

  Bin Laden found the attack on the Cole quite useful. According to The 9/11 Commission Report:

  The attack on the USS Cole galvanized al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts. Following the attack, Bin Laden instructed the media committee, then headed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to produce a propaganda video that included a reenactment of the attack along with images of the al Qaeda training camps and training methods…. Portions were aired on Al Jazeera, CNN, and other television outlets. It was also disseminated among many young men in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and caused many extremists to travel to Afghanistan for training and jihad. Al Qaeda members considered the video an effective tool in their struggle for preeminence among other Islamist and jihadist movements.15

  THE GOVERNMENT FINALLY ACTS

  By 2000, Osama bin Laden might have, with good reason, begun feeling frustrated. In addition to organizing multiple acts of terror that killed dozens of Americans, he had repeatedly declared war on the United States and been ignored.

  One inconvenient exception had occurred in 1996, when bin Laden was living in Sudan, a country that was interested in getting itself removed from the American list of countries that supported terrorism. Sudanese officials offered to maintain surveillance on bin Laden or to arrest him and turn him over to any country that could prosecute him.16 The offer was not purely altruistic; the rulers of Sudan had come to fear bin Laden and his following. Yet the United States refused both offers. Sandy Berger, then Deputy National Security Advisor, later explained, “The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time, and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States.”17 Gerald Posner notes, “This is not surprising. The FBI had not even opened a file on bin Laden until October 1995, only months before Berger claims the administration relied on the Bureau’s decision as to whether the U.S. should seek bin Laden.”18

  The FBI was not prepared to prosecute, and the Saudis, who were happy to keep him and other terrorists as far from themselves as possible, were uninterested. “In the end [U.S. officials] said, ‘Just ask him to leave the country. Just don’t let him go to Somalia,’” Gen. Elfatih Erwa, the Sudanese Minister of State for Defense, later told the Washington Post. “We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, ‘Let him.’”19

  Bin Laden did not go as an impoverished refugee. He chartered a C-130 Hercules military aircraft to transport himself, his wives and children, and 150 aides to their new home.

  The government’s approach was the worst of all possible alternatives. How could anyone think that bin Laden in Afghanistan with no one watching him was superior to bin Laden in Sudan, under surveillance by a country trying to ingratiate itself with the United States? Sudanese Gen. Erwa explained to the Washington Post that three Sudanese intelligence agencies were watching bin Laden. They had planted informants throughout his operations, had bugged his phone lines and fax machines, and kept detailed records on everyone who met with him.20 In Sudan, bin Laden would be unable to lift a finger without it being known, and soon the United States would have intelligence detailing every aspect of his organization and every order that he gave.

  Afghanistan was one of the worst places to have bin Laden; in 1996, the murderous Taliban was solidifying its control over the nation. Upon his arrival, bin Laden infused the Taliban with $3 million, plus thousands of Arab radicals that boosted Taliban numbers at a time when its atrocities were starting to damage recruiting among Afghans. Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid summed up bin Laden’s role on Radio Free Europe:

  He provided funds to them. He provided thousands of fighters. There [are] some 3,000 Arabs fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was involved in many business deals with them in exporting, in consumer goods and smuggling, and also drug trafficking. And he’s also become a kind of ideological mentor of theirs…. He wanted not only to have a sanctuary with the Taliban, but he wanted them to be his allies.21

  AT LAST! THE GOVERNMENT (ALMOST) TARGETS BIN LADEN

  The dangers posed by al-Qaeda and bin Laden were no secret. In 1995, the CIA had released a National Intelligence Estimate titled “The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States”; in 1997, it issued another Estimate that warned: “Civil aviation
remains a particularly attractive target for terrorist attacks.” In 1998, it gave Bill Clinton a Presidential Daily Briefing report titled “Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack U.S. Aircraft and Other Attacks.”22

  But an appropriately lethal response to bin Laden’s attacks was hindered by a peculiar legal barrier. Back in 1975, CIA and FBI activities had been investigated by the Church Committee, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church. Its work was highly critical of CIA activities, including involvement in some homicides overseas.

  In 1976, President Gerald Ford responded with Executive Order 11905, which forbade federal employees to “engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Two years later a similar command, Executive Order 12036, was issued by President Jimmy Carter: the principal difference was to remove the word “political” before “assassination.”

  Then in 1981, President Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which had still broader restrictions. Part 2.11 provided, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” The ban covered not only federal employees but any person “acting on behalf of” the government. Part 2.12 reinforced this point: no federal agency could “request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”

  But none of these Executive Orders defined the word “assassination.” No one seems to have thought that the sniper who shot and tried to kill Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris was attempting an “assassination,” or that the Hostage Rescue Team leader who ordered his snipers to shoot any armed male on sight was ordering them to undertake an “assassination.” Nor would anyone use that word to describe one soldier’s shooting of an enemy soldier. Perhaps “assassination” applies only to lethal termination of foreign government officials? Or perhaps only to those above a certain pay grade? Whatever the definition, in practice, the government’s understanding seems to have been that putting a bullet into Osama bin Laden would be a forbidden assassination, while putting one into Vicki Weaver was merely a justifiable homicide.