Author: Reuel Marc Gerecht
Publication: The Atlantic Monthly
Date: July/August 2001
The United States has spent billions
of dollars on counterterrorism since the U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania
and Kenya, in August of 1998. Tens of millions have been spent on covert
operations specifically targeting Usama bin Ladin and his terrorist organization,
al-Qa'ida. Senior U.S. officials boldly claim-even after the suicide attack
last October on the USS Cole, in the port of Aden-that the Central Intelligence
Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are clandestinely "picking
apart" bin Ladin's organization "limb by limb." But having worked for the
CIA for nearly nine years on Middle Eastern matters (I left the Directorate
of Operations because of frustration with the Agency's many problems),
I would argue that America's counterterrorism program in the Middle East
and its environs is a myth.
Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's
Northwest Frontier, is on the cultural periphery of the Middle East. It
is just down the Grand Trunk Road from the legendary Khyber Pass, the gateway
to Afghanistan. Peshawar is where bin Ladin cut his teeth in the Islamic
jihad, when, in the mid-1980s, he became the financier and logistics man
for the Maktab al-Khidamat, The Office of Services, an overt organization
trying to recruit and aid Muslim, chiefly Arab, volunteers for the war
against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The friendships and associations made
in The Office of Services gave birth to the clandestine al-Qa'ida, The
Base, whose explicit aim is to wage a jihad against the West, especially
the United States.
According to Afghan contacts and
Pakistani officials, bin Ladin's men regularly move through Peshawar and
use it as a hub for phone, fax, and modem communication with the outside
world. Members of the embassy-bombing teams in Africa probably planned
to flee back to Pakistan. Once there they would likely have made their
way into bin Ladin's open arms through al-Qa'ida's numerous friends in
Peshawar. Every tribe and region of Afghanistan is represented in this
city, which is dominated by the Pathans, the pre-eminent tribe in the Northwest
Frontier and southern Afghanistan. Peshawar is also a power base of the
Taliban, Afghanistan's fundamentalist rulers. Knowing the city's ins and
outs would be indispensable to any U.S. effort to capture or kill bin Ladin
and his closest associates. Intelligence collection on al-Qa'ida can't
be of much real value unless the agent network covers Peshawar.
During a recent visit, at sunset,
when the city's cloistered alleys go black except for an occasional flashing
neon sign, I would walk through Afghan neighborhoods. Even in the darkness
I had a case officer's worst sensation-eyes following me everywhere. To
escape the crowds I would pop into carpet, copper, and jewelry shops and
every cybercafé I could find. These were poorly lit one- or two-room
walk-ups where young men surfed Western porn. No matter where I went, the
feeling never left me. I couldn't see how the CIA as it is today had any
chance of running a successful counterterrorist operation against bin Ladin
in Peshawar, the Dodge City of Central Asia.
Westerners cannot visit the cinder-block,
mud-brick side of the Muslim world-whence bin Ladin's foot soldiers mostly
come-without announcing who they are. No case officer stationed in Pakistan
can penetrate either the Afghan communities in Peshawar or the Northwest
Frontier's numerous religious schools, which feed manpower and ideas to
bin Ladin and the Taliban, and seriously expect to gather useful information
about radical Islamic terrorism-let alone recruit foreign agents.
Even a Muslim CIA officer with native-language
abilities (and the Agency, according to several active-duty case officers,
has very few operatives from Middle Eastern backgrounds) could do little
more in this environment than a blond, blue-eyed all-American. Case officers
cannot long escape the embassies and consulates in which they serve. A
U.S. official overseas, photographed and registered with the local intelligence
and security services, can't travel much, particularly in a police-rich
country like Pakistan, without the "host" services' knowing about it. An
officer who tries to go native, pretending to be a true-believing radical
Muslim searching for brothers in the cause, will make a fool of himself
quickly.
In Pakistan, where the government's
Inter-Services Intelligence Agency and the ruling army are competent and
tough, the CIA can do little if these institutions are against it. And
they are against it. Where the Taliban and Usama bin Ladin are concerned,
Pakistan and the United States aren't allies. Relations between the two
countries have been poor for years, owing to American opposition to Pakistan's
successful nuclear-weapons program and, more recently, Islamabad's backing
of Muslim Kashmiri separatists. Bin Ladin's presence in Afghanistan as
a "guest" of the Pakistani-backed Taliban has injected even more distrust
and suspicion into the relationship.
In other words, American intelligence
has not gained and will not gain Pakistan's assistance in its pursuit of
bin Ladin. The only effective way to run offensive counterterrorist operations
against Islamic radicals in more or less hostile territory is with "non-official-cover"
officers-operatives who are in no way openly attached to the U.S. government.
Imagine James Bond minus the gadgets, the women, the Walther PPK, and the
Aston Martin. But as of late 1999 no program to insert NOCs into an Islamic
fundamentalist organization abroad had been implemented, according to one
such officer who has served in the Middle East. "NOCs haven't really changed
at all since the Cold War," he told me recently. "We're still a group of
fake businessmen who live in big houses overseas. We don't go to mosques
and pray."
A former senior Near East Division
operative says, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified
Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable
Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with
shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's
sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that
kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the problem down even further:
"Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
Behind-the-lines counterterrorism
operations are just too dangerous for CIA officers to participate in directly.
When I was in the Directorate of Operations, the Agency would deploy a
small army of officers for a meeting with a possibly dangerous foreigner
if he couldn't be met in the safety of a U.S. embassy or consulate. Officers
still in the clandestine service say that the Agency's risk-averse, bureaucratic
nature-which mirrors, of course, the growing physical risk-aversion of
American society-has only gotten worse.
few miles from Peshawar's
central bazaar, near the old Cantonment, where redcoats once drilled and
where the U.S. consulate can be found, is the American Club, a traditional
hangout for international-aid workers, diplomats, journalists, and spooks.
Worn-out Western travelers often stop here on the way from Afghanistan
to decompress; one can buy a drink, watch videos, order a steak. Security
warnings from the American embassy are posted on the club's hallway bulletin
board.
The bulletins I saw last December
advised U.S. officials and their families to stay away from crowds, mosques,
and anyplace else devout Pakistanis and Afghans might gather. The U.S.
embassy in Islamabad, a fortress surrounded by roadblocks, Pakistani soldiers,
and walls topped with security cameras and razor wire, strongly recommended
a low profile-essentially life within the Westernized, high-walled Cantonment
area or other spots where diplomats are unlikely to bump into fundamentalists.
Such warnings accurately reflect
the mentality inside both the Department of State and the CIA. Individual
officers may venture out, but their curiosity isn't encouraged or rewarded.
Unless one of bin Ladin's foot soldiers walks through the door of a U.S.
consulate or embassy, the odds that a CIA counterterrorist officer will
ever see one are extremely poor.
The Directorate of Operations' history
of success has done little to prepare the CIA for its confrontation with
radical Islamic terrorism. Perhaps the DO's most memorable victory was
against militant Palestinian groups in the 1970s and 1980s. The CIA could
find common ground with Palestinian militants, who often drink, womanize,
and spend time in nice hotels in pleasant, comfortable countries. Still,
its "penetrations" of the PLO-delightfully and kindly rendered in David
Ignatius's novel Agents of Innocence (1987)-were essentially emissaries
from Yasir Arafat to the U.S. government.
Difficulties with fundamentalism
and mud-brick neighborhoods aside, the CIA has stubbornly refused to develop
cadres of operatives specializing in one or two countries. Throughout the
Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) the DO never developed a team of Afghan experts.
The first case officer in Afghanistan to have some proficiency in an Afghan
language didn't arrive until 1987, just a year and a half before the war's
end. Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East case officers of
the past twenty years (and the only operative in the 1980s to collect consistently
first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hizbollah and the Palestinian Islamic
Jihad), suggested to headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might
want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the neighboring Central
Asian republics of the former Soviet Union.
Headquarters' reply: Too dangerous,
and why bother? The Cold War there was over with the Soviet withdrawal
in 1989. Afghanistan was too far away, internecine warfare was seen as
endemic, and radical Islam was an abstract idea. Afghanistan has since
become the brain center and training ground for Islamic terrorism against
the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine service still usually keeps
officers on the Afghan account no more than two or three years.
Until October of 1999 no CIA official
visited Ahmad Shah Mas'ud in Afghanistan. Mas'ud is the ruler of northeastern
Afghanistan and the leader of the only force still fighting the Taliban.
He was the most accomplished commander of the anti-Soviet mujahideen guerrillas;
his army now daily confronts Arab military units that are under the banner
of bin Ladin, yet no CIA case officer has yet debriefed Mas'ud's soldiers
on the front lines or the Pakistani, Afghan, Chinese-Turkoman, and Arab
holy warriors they've captured.
The CIA's Counterterrorism Center,
which now has hundreds of employees from numerous government agencies,
was the creation of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, an extraordinarily energetic
bureaucrat-spook. In less than a year in the mid-1980s Clarridge converted
a three-man operation confined to one room with one TV set broadcasting
CNN into a staff that rivaled the clandestine service's Near East Division
for primacy in counterterrorist operations. Yet the Counterterrorism Center
didn't alter the CIA's methods overseas at all. "We didn't really think
about the details of operations-how we would penetrate this or that group,"
a former senior counterterrorist official says. "Victory for us meant that
we stopped [Thomas] Twetten [the chief of the clandestine service's Near
East Division] from walking all over us." In my years inside the CIA, I
never once heard case officers overseas or back at headquarters discuss
the ABCs of a recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern target that
took a case officer far off the diplomatic and business-conference circuits.
Long-term seeding operations simply didn't occur.
George Tenet, who became the director
of the CIA in 1997, has repeatedly described America's counterterrorist
program as "robust" and in most cases successful at keeping bin Ladin's
terrorists "off-balance" and anxious about their own security. The Clinton
Administration's senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security
Council, Richard Clarke, who has continued as the counterterrorist czar
in the Bush Administration, is sure that bin Ladin and his men stay awake
at night "around the campfire" in Afghanistan, "worried stiff about who
we're going to get next."
If we are going to defeat Usama
bin Ladin, we need to openly side with Ahmad Shah Mas'ud, who still has
a decent chance of fracturing the tribal coalition behind Taliban power.
That, more effectively than any clandestine counterterrorist program in
the Middle East, might eventually force al-Qa'ida's leader to flee Afghanistan,
where U.S. and allied intelligence and military forces cannot reach him.
Until then, I don't think Usama
bin Ladin and his allies will be losing much sleep around the campfire.
