Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
The battle over the Predator program has been written about at length, including in the commission's report. But U.S. News has obtained substantive, previously undisclosed information about the covert operation. The details cast added light on the technical difficulties of the mission and the raging debate that ensued between the CIA and the military over who would kill bin Laden, if it came to that, even as the system was "blinking red," as the commission has said, in the summer of 2001, that bin Laden was planning a major attack against U.S. interests.
The quest to arm the Predator reveals how a fear of failure, technical challenges, bureaucratic infighting, and real concerns that the American public would somehow not understand or approve of the killing of bin Laden or the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, resulted in the failure to execute a powerful plan in time.
The story begins in 1998, when al Qaeda blew up two American embassies, in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. The attacks led President Clinton to sign a secret finding, authorizing the CIA to kill bin Laden. But it was easier said than done. As has been widely reported, the CIA soon acted on intelligence it had obtained about bin Laden's whereabouts, giving that information to the military. The Central Command's naval forces launched some 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a terrorist training camp outside Khost, in Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, that was believed to be a chemical weapons plant in disguise. But because of the time it took to coordinate and plan the strikes and the time it took for the missiles to reach their targets, bin Laden got away and the attacks turned into high-profile failures for the administration, especially because it came at a time when Clinton was embroiled in a legal deposition on his sexual affair with Monica Lewinsky. The attacks also provoked allegations of "wag the dog," in other words, a deliberately staged distraction from the scandal, infuriating Clinton and his senior advisers. As has also been widely documented, Clinton then also authorized the killing of bin Laden's top lieutenants, but the agency failed in that mission as well.
"What we found was that we didn't have reliable information about our CIA contacts in the country. The CIA said their [human intelligence] contacts gave only vague information about bin Laden and his whereabouts," says a former senior defense official who provided U.S. News with exclusive new details of the Bush administration's efforts to arm Predator. "And of course to shoot those missiles from the submarines or surface ships in the Gulf of Pakistan took a heck of a long time to set up even though some targets may have been preregistered." Indeed, this official said, the flight times of the missiles, depending on which training area bin Laden was located at, could take up to six hours.
The lack of predictive and actionable intelligence became glaring two years later, when al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole, off the coast of Yemen. The CIA clearly had realized by then what a threat bin Laden was. One senior CIA official who truly understood the problem, according to former counterterrorism and defense officials, was Charles Allen, the CIA's assistant director of central intelligence for collection. Allen is now the chief intelligence officer at the Department of Homeland Security.
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