Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
When former President Bill Clinton appeared on Fox News Sunday this week to discuss his climate change initiative and other issues, no one predicted a stormy forecast for the interview with host Chris Wallace. But when Wallace asked the president why he hadn't "put [Osama] bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business," Clinton began his ominous finger-wagging, always a clear indication that gale force winds were gathering on the horizon. Wallace quickly found himself in the eye of the storm as Clinton launched into a dark tirade, accusing "President Bush's neocons" and other Republicans of turning their backs on the bin Laden threat until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and criticizing Wallace for his "conservative hit job."
The former president told Wallace that he had authorized the CIA to kill bin Laden and even "contracted with people to kill him." Clinton said he also had put together a broad, comprehensive strategy to hunt the al Qaeda leader down after the bombing of the USS Cole and to attack Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban. But, said Clinton, the FBI and CIA refused to certify that bin Laden had ordered the Cole attack, and Uzbekistan had refused to allow the United States to set up a base for military operations.
In contrast, her said, Bush's team "had no meetings on bin Laden for nine months," believing Clinton had been "too obsessed" with the terrorist leader.
"They ridiculed me for trying," said Clinton. "They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried."
Clinton's rage opened up a Pandora's box of arguments about whether his administration or his successor's could or should have done more to prevent the 9/11 attacks. It revealed the festering political wounds on both sides, five years later.
"The scab on this has not healed at all," says Roger Cressey, a former senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Bush White House, "and it doesn't take much to pull it off." After the ex-president's televised tongue-lashing, Secretary of Sate Condoleezza Rice and other administration officials denied that Clinton had left behind a broad antiterrorism plan for his successor, as he stated.
And they raised more than a few arched eyebrows at Clinton's claim that he had a plan to counter the Cole bombing.
"We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda," Rice told the New York Post, adding that "nobody organized this country or the international community to fight the terrorist threat that was upon us until 9/11."
In a way, they were both partly right.
Tomes have been written about the failure of intelligence and the U.S. government's inability and to some extent unwillingness to deal forcefully with bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to 9/11. The national commission investigating the 9/11 attacks produced an authoritative history of these failures. But because of the recent debate, a covert operation that straddled both administrations, and was central to their strategy for killing bin Laden, may bear re-examining. The operation, which began in the twilight of the Clinton administration and culminated, tragically, only after the 9/11 attacks, was a highly classified covert CIA project known as "Night Fist" in 2000 and renamed "Positive Plot" in 2001. It involved weaponizing an unmanned reconnaissance plane called the Predator, and flying it into Afghanistan to kill 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.
"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.
"We heard about it and thought it was a great idea," says Cressey.
In the late fall of 2000, as massive winds buffeted the mountainous region of Afghanistan where bin Laden was living, the Predator could no longer be kept flying safely, so it was brought back to the United States. The Air Force, at the prompting of the NSC, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs, began arming the Predator under the covert Night Fist project. But taking an unmanned prop plane and equipping it with Hellfire missiles lethal and accurate enough to kill bin Laden from the sky, without too much collateral damage, was a huge technical challenge, the former senior defense official said.
"It required an upgraded sensor system," says the official, "and we had to fly the airplane with the missile to see what challenges we had in the area of aerodynamics and what would happen when we fired a missile from the plane."
The secretive Air Force agency known as "Big Safari," whose technicians can work magic with any aircraft to modify it for complex military operations, equipped two Predators with two Hellfire missiles each. The CIA purchased 60 missiles from the U.S. Marine Corps, and shortly before the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Army also began providing Hellfires, the official said. The Predators and Hellfires were tested at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, located in the middle of California's Mojave Desert. The station is home to the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons division, where the Navy and Marine Corps develop and test most of their airborne weapons systems.
As Big Safari technicians struggled to convert a recon plane into a killing machine under cover of darkness in the cold desert, the heat was on from Clarke and Cressey at the NSC, Allen at the CIA, and Fry and Gration at the Pentagon, according to knowledgeable officials.
"The Bush administration pushed very hard to get the Predator armed and into the area of operations," says the former senior military official, "so that efforts could be made to rid us of the threat of bin Laden and al Qaeda." So much so that the plane was ready for testing, in the late spring of 2001, three months after the process of arming it began, instead of the originally slated three years, the official said. By then the covert program had been renamed "Positive Plot." Allen felt a particular sense of urgency, according to Cressey and the military official.
"We need to hit him," Allen told his colleagues at a meeting in the summer of 2001, "before he hits us."
At the NSC, Clarke certainly needed no convincing. Just a few months earlier, on Jan. 25, 2001, he had submitted a memo and a copy of a 1998 plan he had drafted to combat al Qaeda. "We urgently need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network," Clarke wrote. According to the 9/11 commission report, Clarke wanted the principals – consisting of the members of the cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior administration officials–to educate themselves whether al Qaeda was a "first order threat" or "some narrow little terrorist issue" that was being overblown by "Chicken Little" alarmists." The commission determined that Clarke became convinced that Bush officials refused to treat his concerns seriously enough, failed to act on his repeated requests to schedule that principals meeting early in 2001, and failed to act on what he describes as a comprehensive plan to defeat the al Qaeda movement.
The national commission wrote that Clarke was also frustrated by Rice's restructuring of the NTSC's counterterrorism policy so that Clarke no longer reported directly to the principals committee as he had under Clinton but, as with all other committees, reported to the principals through the deputies.
But the commission said that Clarke worried that "reporting through the Deputies Committee would slow decision making on counterterrorism." Clarke felt he had been demoted, because he had under Clinton acted as a de facto principal, the commission said. He also did not enjoy the same level of access to Bush as he did to Clinton.
"In the first months of the Bush administration, Rice and Clarke were ships passing in the night," says Daniel Marcus, the former general counsel of the 9/11 commission.
"Clarke felt cut out and that necessary decisions were not being made. Rice felt that Clarke did not appreciate the need to develop a comprehensive new policy to replace what she viewed as a 'tit for tat' approach of the Clinton administration." Clarke declined to be interviewed for this story.
As this bitter power struggle at the NSC emerged, so also did the armed Predator, in the inky California sky, as a series of tests commenced under Positive Plot. The technicians at Big Safari built a replica of the home that bin Laden lived in at Tarnak Farms, a square, squat building whose structure and density the technicians approximated with satellite imagery provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The goal was to fire Hellfires into the house to see how effective the warheads were.
Big Safari conducted somewhere in the vicinity of 20 test shots. In the early tests, because there was so much time pressure, the technicians filled the farmhouse replica with pumpkins that were filling in, so to speak, for bin Laden, to make a rough judgment on the lethality of the warheads. Later, as the CIA provided more funds and the testing became more sophisticated, the technicians installed sensors in the corners of the house and placed plywood "fragmentation boards," or "witness panels," smooth plywood panels installed on walls, that would capture the warhead fragments, to accurately measure their density and dispersion, the official told U.S. News.
But the early tests were not encouraging. The Hellfire missiles typically are equipped with two types of warheads–blast fragmentation, or "blast frag," warheads, and armor-piercing rounds. The technicians discovered that the latter, while good at penetrating tanks, would set off only a small blast and create very few fragments.
"It did not give us a high enough probability of kill," this official said, "inside the room." So the Air Force went with the "blast frag" missile and later attempted to improve the warhead, to increase its lethality, the official said.
Even as the debate continued at a furious pace as to whether the warheads would kill bin Laden, the action shifted from the Mojave Desert back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., where, in June 2001, U.S. officials at the assistant secretary and deputy assistant secretary level were taken through a tabletop war game, which has not previously been disclosed. It was a dramatic session. The officials were shown the Predator videos of bin Laden from the previous fall, walking around Tarnak Farms, talking to people, visiting the mosque. They were asked whether, if they were informed that an armed Predator had shot the pictures, would they recommend pulling the trigger? The officials unanimously said yes, according to the former military official. That approval at the NSC policy coordination committee level was to be passed on to the deputies committee and to the principals committee. But Clarke continued to struggle to get a principals meeting arranged.
That was the least of his problems. The whole Predator project had for months created huge angst both at the CIA and at the military. One unresolved issue was who would pull the trigger, if indeed the Predator were launched against bin Laden. Gen. Richard Myers, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not want the Air Force to be involved in what Myers and others in the military feared would be viewed by the public as an assassination of bin Laden and of de facto government leaders such as the Taliban's Omar.
Myers believed there were other, more viable military options that also would be more politically palatable and wanted an operation that would have "plausible deniability" for the Department of Defense, the former senior military official says. Myers believed it was sufficient to have the Predator used for spotting bin Laden and then have subs and surface ships stationed off the Gulf of Pakistan to fire Tomahawk missiles.
"It looks different to the military when you have 16 Tomahawks arriving and blowing the place up," this official said, "than when you have one Hellfire, killing one man."
There also was the question as to whether killing bin Laden would end the threat from al Qaeda. The military feared that in fact it could result in repercussions against U.S. forces abroad. Like Myers, the U.S. Air Force was extremely reluctant to get involved and wanted the CIA to do the killing and the funding.
"The CIA was always asking for more and more support," says the former military official, "and the Air Force was saying that the CIA wasn't paying them enough to do the work." Over at the agency, Tenet and his deputy director for operations, Pavitt, were reluctant to divert funds from other crucial programs to fund the Predator operation, administration officials say. Pavitt feared that bin Laden loyalists would target CIA case officers overseas if their role in Predator became public.
Even getting the Hellfire missiles was a challenge, because at first the U.S. Army simply refused to provide any, according to the former military official. So the Air Force turned to the Marine Corps. In the late summer of 2001, the Army finally jumped into the act and wanted to provide missiles, but U.S. officials say getting them from the Army's Redstone arsenal was always a bit like pulling teeth.
Another big question: If one of the Predators got shot down in Afghanistan, or crashed, who would pay to fix it? That resulted, former administration officials say, in a long period of negotiations between the CIA and the Air Force as to who would be responsible for what. The matter was finally settled through a memorandum of understanding that said that the Air Force would pay for the first plane that went down and the CIA would pay for the next. The debate over who would pay for repairs was "bureaucratic, not unimportant," the former intelligence official said. "But the debate did not slow down the deployment of the armed Predator. It was technically not ready."
The worries over the public-relations implications continued. The Air Force even made sure that the officers and enlisted men who would take part in the project were given temporary CIA-detailee status, so that they were considered CIA operatives, not Air Force operatives, according to the former military official.
"The big concern was what happens the day after, if we do this," says the official.
Through the summer of 2001, the CIA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense went through all the various "what ifs," according to administration officials.
"The NSC was tearing its hair out," says Cressey. "We were saying, 'Is this a priority or isn't this a priority?'" Tenet's deputy John McLaughlin informed Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, who is now Bush's national security adviser, that the CIA and Air Force had failed to come up with an agreement on funding issues. Hadley made repeated attempts to try to forge an agreement, says Cressey, but failed.
"I give Steve a lot of points," Cressey says, "for trying to solve this issue."
However, knowledgeable sources say that lack of forceful intervention by the NSC resulted in a stalemate. The to-ing and fro-ing continued.
On Aug. 15, 2001, Air Force officials were still grumbling about the CIA's "nickel and diming" of the operation and were concerned that the final tests, scheduled for August 24 at China Lake, would have to be postponed. But military sources say the CIA came through with the money by August 20, and the tests were conducted. On August 28, the first group of CIA operatives left for Uzbekistan, even as the paperwork detailing the operation began to be distributed to the principals. At a final technical meeting held at the CIA the next day, the operational staff laid out a schedule for the armed Predators to be deployed.
According to the former military official knowledgeable about the program, the schedule was as follows: Sept. 2, 2001, the CIA operatives were to arrive in Tashkent with the hangars for the Predator, to be set up two days later. On the 10th, the communications infrastructure would be installed. A second group of operatives were to have arrived by then.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the Predators were to have been readied for transporting. The first Predator was to have left by September 12, arriving on the 18th. The second would be shipped out the 14th or 15th, along with the Hellfires, to arrive on September 19. The Predators would be readied in Uzbekistan between the 19th and the 25th. The first cross-border flight was scheduled for Sept. 25, 2001. There was a lot of discussion about how the Uzbek officials would respond to the arrival of the Predators and how to inform them about the nature of the operation.
Finally, on Sept. 4, 2001, the principals committee meeting that Clark had sought for months took place.
By then, one of the planes had already been packed – minus the Hellfires – into a CIA transport plane. The CIA's Allen warned that the committee had to decide quickly whether to fly the Predators, because with the arrival of fall and bad weather, the fly window was quickly diminishing.
"We were waiting," the former military official says, "for the thumbs up or thumbs down."
It was a thumbs down. After Tenet made his presentation on the results of the Hellfire testing and described the probability of killing bin Laden with a missile as low, Rice expressed concerns that the warheads still weren't as lethal as they needed to be to ensure that any attack on bin Laden would be guaranteed successful. The Summary of Conclusions approved at the end of the meeting recommended that the Air Force continue to work on that problem, according to the former defense official who detailed the Bush administration effort. In the meantime, Rice asked the CIA and the military to resolve any outstanding funding issues, so that the agency could quickly fly the unarmed Predators to Uzbekistan, to resume reconnaissance missions against bin Laden in Afghanistan, until the lethality issues were resolved. Tenet made a firm commitment to "fly the hell" out of the Predators, for reconnaissance, the former military official says. Rice also directed the CIA and the military to commence an information operations campaign against al Qaeda and to have the CENTCOM and the SOCOM, the Special Forces command, continue to prepare options other than the Predator to act against bin Laden, if the CIA developed "targetable intelligence."
The former intelligence official says that even after 9/11, the Air Force said the Predator was still not ready. "The CIA said, 'screw that,'" the official said, "We'll test it in Afghanistan."
Looking back, the Bush administration arguably missed perhaps the most important deadline in modern American history. "We were so close, and we were disappointed when the principals committee decided not to send the Predator with Hellfires," says the former senior military official. "But by midmorning of September 11, we knew that the Predator would be armed and flying over Afghanistan."
And that's exactly what happened. Once the September 11 attacks took place, all of the funding issues and the ethical issues and moral quandaries dissolved. The technical doubts about whether the Predator could perform, though laudable at the time, became laughable after 9/11, as the Predator turned into a lethal superstar, with a very high probability of killing the enemy, and became the weapon of choice, decimating Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. Why did the government so badly underestimate the Predator's effectiveness? It turns out that the buildings in Afghanistan were far less sturdy than what U.S. officials had planned for.
With Carol Hook, Danielle Burton, and Stephanie Salmon in the U.S. News library