Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
"Charlie Allen was part of a small group of people who absolutely got it," says Cressey, "and were trying to be proactive and aggressive." Allen and other officials repeatedly communicated their concerns to Richard Clarke, the nation's first counterterrorism czar at the National Security Council, who served both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and with Cressey, who was Clarke's deputy. But there was enormous resistance in the CIA, especially by the deputy director for operations, James Pavitt, who according to Cressey "didn't view bin Laden as a big enough threat to warrant a redistribution of resources." Pavitt declined to offer specific details of his concerns about the Predator program.
"I had strong views about what would work and what would not work," Pavitt told U.S. News. "I was not interested in doing things that I did not believe had any chance of success."
Yet in the final analysis, former administration officials say, CIA Director George Tenet definitely understood the threat bin Laden posed to U.S. interests. Tenet declined to comment for this story. But a former intelligence official familiar with the debate told U.S. News that the deployment of the Predator in the summer of 2001 would not have prevented the 9/11 attacks because the hijackers were already in the United States. "The plan had been developed over a period of years," this official said. "The 9/11 attack would still have happened, and professional second-guessers would probably have blamed the administration for causing it."
In the fall of 2000, there was a dramatic breakthrough–a real possibility of having the means to nail bin Laden–when the CIA borrowed a 950-pound unmanned propeller plane, called the Predator, to conduct 24-7 video surveillance of bin Laden from the skies over Afghanistan. Cressey says the CIA's counterterrorist center supported the mission but that senior CIA officials in the directorate of operations, including Pavitt, "were less than helpful through every step of the process."
Unbeknownst to the Taliban or bin Laden's bodyguards, the Predator quietly shot hours of video of a tall robed man who the CIA believed was bin Laden, walking around at the Tarnak Farms training camp in Afghanistan; sometimes standing by himself, at other times surrounded by a crowd; visiting a mosque and someone's home.
As one former official describes it, when the first images were beamed back, CIA analysts were stunned.
It was as if they had been transported into the movie Patriot Games, starring Harrison Ford in the role of Tom Clancy-created CIA analyst Jack Ryan. In the story, Ryan foils Irish terrorists and watches the United States destroy the terrorists' training camps in Africa. For the CIA analysts who had spent years looking at grainy satellite imagery the size of postage stamps, the hours of clear, real-time videos of bin Laden were a feast for the eyes.
The pictures won over some of the doubters at the CIA, and senior agency officials began wearing their badges on lanyards imprinted with images of the Predator, the official says. But the battle was far from over. Around the time of the reconnaissance flights of the Predator, which belonged to the Air Force but had been lent or "bailed" to the CIA, Clarke, Cressey, Allen, and Pentagon officials – specifically Vice Adm. Scott Fry and Brig. Gen. Jonathan Scott Gration – learned that the commander of the Air Force's Air Combat Command, Gen. Johnny Jumper, was pushing to get the Predator armed, but only with the intent to use it for general combat operations.
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