31 October 2000

Posted on October 31, 2020November 3, 2020 by William Arkin

President Clinton signs additional covert action authorities for fighting al Qaeda, including expanding the number of individuals who were subject to capture operations. The formal presidential “findings,” a series of six Memorandum of Notifications, built upon previous (July 1999) covert action authorities already granted to the CIA.

Authority to undertake capture operations are specified by individuals and by country as to what assistance and circumstances the Agency can seek foreign government (and foreign organization) help. There are no “lethal” authorities per se, though obviously in 1998, cruise missile attacks against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda sought to kill the leader.

CIA Director George Tenet is also instructed to develop additional capabilities beyond those already granted in 1999, such as strengthening relationships with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and Uzbek groups in Afghanistan. Another Memorandum calls for covert action to fight the expansion of al Qaeda into Lebanon.

30 October 2000

Posted on October 30, 2020November 3, 2020 by William Arkin

Sandy Berger passes the baton to Condoleezza Rice

After the attack on the USS Cole, but absent any “proof” of al Qaeda culpability, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger agrees to a State Department proposal making another approach to the Taliban to expel Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan.

U.S. diplomats had already been in touch with Deputy Foreign Minister Abdul Jalil and now Berger orders that the U.S. message to the Taliban “be stern and foreboding.”

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration is also working with the Russian government on new U.N. sanctions against Mullah Omar’s regime.

Between 1998 and 9/11, the United States issued a half dozen threats to the Taliban, both about bin Laden and support for al Qaeda, and to protest the treatment of women. None of the warnings had any effect.

29 October 2000

Posted on October 30, 2020November 3, 2020 by William Arkin

Unknown to U.S. intelligence, Ziad Jarrah (the hijacker pilot of United Airlines flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania) returns to the United States from a trip to Germany just two weeks after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It was the first of five foreign trips he would take during his time in the United States.

It was the first or last time that Jarrah would depart from the United States to see his common law wife, Aysel Senguen. As the most westernized of the hijackers, and also married, Jarrah was relatively invisible to immigration and customs officials. The 9/11 Commission later reported that Jarrah “made hundreds of phone calls to her and communicated frequently by email” during his stay in the United States (911 Commission, p. 224) but because they were in German–and were mostly love letters and other communications dealing with the day-to-day lives of the two–U.S. intelligence never paid attention.

Jarrah flew from Atlanta, Georgia to Frankfurt, Germany on Delta Flight 20 on October 7, just five days before the Cole was attacked. Mohammed Atta (the plot’s emir in the U.S.) worried that given the terrorist attack, he might not be able to return, with intelligence vigilance and police measures being tightened. Jarrah and Aysel went to Paris for a late honeymoon while al Qaeda pondered whether it lost one of its valuable pilots.

Finally, on the 29th, Jarrah arrived back in the United States, flying from Dusseldorf, Germany (Condor Flight 7178) to Frankfurt and on to Tampa, Florida (Lufthansa Flight 223). On a tourist visa, he received a six-month length of stay in the United States. Immigration and customs asked nothing.

28 October 2000

Posted on October 28, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

The only known drop-out amongst the 9/11 hijackers, Mushabib al Hamlan, a Saudi, acquires a two-year B1/B2 (tourist/business) visa for the United States. He never travels to the U.S. and the 9/11 Commission later speculates that perhaps he dropped out “at the urging of his family.”

Mushabib is friends with Ahmed al Nami, one of four hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. (Another clue that Mushabib was to be the fifth “muscleman” about UA 93 was that all the other four planes had five hijackers.)

On the same day Mushabib applies for his visa in Jeddah, his friend Ahmed al Nami, a Saudi, applies for and receives a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa. A later review of Nami’s application to the State Department revealed that it was incomplete. He listed his occupations as “student” but did not provide a complete address for his school, as we required. And he listed his intended address in the United States as “in Los Angeles” even though he never went there. Nami’s passport may have contained fraudulent travel stamps to obscure al Qaeda-related travel. On his application, Nami indicated that “my friend Moshabab” would be traveling with him.

27 October 2000

Posted on October 27, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

Army Gen. Peter Jan Schoomaker retires as SOCOM commander, replaced by Air Force Gen. Charles Holland.

At Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Schoomaker had replaced Gen. Henry (“Hugh”) Shelton, who became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had previously served as the commanding general of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from July 1994 to August 1996, followed by command of the United States Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

A known conservative and aggressive special operations man, Schoomaker wanted to take action against al Qaeda in Afghanistan but was never able to gain approval.

After 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld found Gen. Holland way too passive and doctrinaire in employing America’s secret forces in Afghanistan. Though he also had a prodigious special operations background (and had served as deputy commanding general of JSOC), Rumsfeld iced him out, maybe as well because he hadn’t appointed him.

From the sidelines, Schoomaker—now a defense contractor—kibbitzed on tactics and strategy for the burgeoning global war on terror and the increased use of special operations. On August 1, 2003, Rumsfeld brought Schoomaker out of retirement to be the 35th chief of staff of the Army and a close advisor.

26 October 2000

Posted on October 26, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

The Military Intelligence Board (MIB) meets and discusses the issue of “need to know.”

The board (made up of senior directors of the Defense Department intelligence components) coordinates activities of the defense intelligence community, sets policies, and coordinates allocation of intelligence assets.

According to the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, a top secret-level Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry, the DIA representative said that most of military intelligence had moved away from “need to know,” the doctrine of restricting the circulation of intelligence, even inside classified systems, to protect “sources and methods” regarding the origins of the intelligence. In most cases, this also facilitated the creation of then emerging networks and information architectures that allowed analysts to openly share information, or at least to query other-agency databanks, to find intelligence hidden within the vast American collection machine.

The board took note of that fundamental difference with the CIA, which adhered to the principle of need to know “as a foundation” and rarely shared raw intelligence with the defense agencies. According to the partially declassified Joint Inquiry, “the DIA attendee concluded that the defense intelligence community would not be able to bridge the gap with CIA on this information sharing issue.”

It was an important pre-9/11 discussion because, after the attacks, the CIA and FBI blamed “The Wall” between intelligence and law enforcement—a Clinton administration rule—that sought not to contaminate investigative material so that it was unusable in a court of law, and also segregated intelligence that could not be divulged in court from influencing an investigation if the intelligence could not be part of grand jury and legal proceedings.

Both agencies used The Wall to justify not sharing, but that was never its intent, particularly when it came to time sensitive information that was immediate use, such as in stopping a terrorist attack. Lost in the post-9/11 blame game was the cultural reason for not sharing.

25 October 2000

Posted on October 25, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

The Washington Times reports that the NSA issued a top-secret intelligence report on the day the destroyer USS Cole was attacked in Yemen—the alert warning that terrorists were planning an attack against the United States in the Middle East. It isn’t the first (or last) time that NSA was implicated in possessing intelligence that provided tactical warning but never got disseminated in time or sent to the right people.

Bill Gertz reports that the NSA report was not dispatched until several hours after the bombing. The report, according to officials who were familiar with the top-secret intelligence, stated that unidentified terrorists were involved in “operational planning” for an attack on U.S. or Israeli personnel or property in the Middle East. One official said the warning was specific as to an attack in Yemen. Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, agreed that the NSA report was specific. He investigated the NSA warning and later told Gertz that the warning “related specifically to Yemen.” (Breakdown, p. 51)

Is it true? What’s more important is that through 9/11 (and about 9/11) we just don’t know what intelligence NSA possessed or reported because the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency evades deep scrutiny, even after disasters. And history is distorted, at least U.S. history, by the absence of much information on the substance of intelligence reporting: what the IC knows, what subject matters it collects on, what happens to the intelligence. Intelligence leaders are always ready to boast that intelligence on this and that saved lives, but the substance is really a black hole.

24 October 2000

Posted on October 24, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

In the category of nothing ever changes… Secretary of State Madeleine Albright concludes a two-day visit to Pyongyang, North Korea, meeting with Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un. During the visit, Kim tells her that North Korea would not further test its Taepo Dong-1 long-range missile. In addition to discussing Pyongyang’s indigenous missile production, the talks cover North Korean missile technology exports, and greater nuclear transparency.

On the agenda also are the carrot of the normalization of relations and a possible trip by President Bill Clinton to Pyongyang before he leaves office.

In the final presidential debate of the 2020 election season, former Vice President Joe Biden and President Trump traded barbs over North Korea, Biden criticizing Trump for being too chummy with Kim. Trump shot back that the Obama administration had watched North Korea develop its nuclear weapons and missiles without doing much, failing as well to secure a meeting.

Biden shot back: “We had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded the rest of Europe. The reason [Kim] wouldn’t meet with President Obama is because [Obama] said we’re going to talk about denuclearization.”

Biden and company continue to argue that pursuing denuclearization makes no sense because… because it’s not going to happen. “What has he done?” Biden said of Trump. “He’s legitimized North Korea…” And yet that’s been the American endeavor for decades, and not only that, but backwater North Korea has learned that nuclear weapons earn it a place in American foreign policy—as much an incentive as any other to be a nuclear power.

As for the connection to 9/11, the attacks completely took the American eye off the peninsula and North Korea went on to test its first nuclear device on October 9, 2006, while the Bush administration was amidst the worst phase of violence in Iraq and still aggressively pursuing the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

23 October 1983

Posted on October 23, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

U.S. Marine Corps barracks at the Beirut Airport after a terrorist attack

The age of mega terrorism begins in Lebanon. Using massive truck bombs, Hizballah simultaneously attacks the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks at the Beirut Airport and a housing complex for French paratroopers in West Beirut. The blasts kill 241 Marines and 58 French paratroopers.

At approximate 6:22 AM, a large truck laden with explosives equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT crashed through barbed wire and concertina fencing of the U.S. compound at Beirut International Airport and detonated at the front entrance to the Marine Battalion Landing Team Headquarters. The truck penetrated the obstacles, passed between guard positions six and seven without being engaged, entered an open gate, passed around one sewer pipe obstacle and between two others, flattened the sergeant-of-the guard booth, and entered the interior of the lobby by passing through the main entrance, and then exploded. The force of the explosion destroyed the building.

FBI forensic laboratory investigators later described the blast as the largest conventional blast ever seen by their community. Just in April, another attack had destroyed the U.S. embassy.

The bombings successfully caused the removal of the multinational force, in particular the U.S. contingent, from Lebanon. The government of Iran and Syria were ultimately implicated in the attack. That’s almost 40 years ago. Some things never change.

George H.W. Bush at the Beirut Airport after a terrorist attack

22 October 2000

Posted on October 22, 2020October 30, 2020 by William Arkin

The government in Yemen stonewalls after the attack on the USS Cole (see October 12), thereby confusing the collection of “evidence” that al Qaeda is responsible and impeding retaliation. There are many reasons—the election voting standoff between Bush and Gore, an impending change in administrations, disbelief in al Qaeda, and skepticism about the value of cruise missile attacks—that also ultimately stand in the way of an American “response,” but Yemen’s foot-dragging, and even lying, has a major impact.

Within the first weeks after the Cole attack, the Yemenis arrest two key figures in the attack. But they forbid the FBI investigators on the ground from participating in the interrogations. President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and CIA Director George Tenet all intervene to try to help but Yemen doesn’t budge. Ultimately, the 911 Commission concludes that because information from the suspects comes in that is secondhand, the U.S. could not make its own assessment of its reliability (911 Commission, p. 192).

Yemen would continue to be a haven for al Qaeda, even after 9/11. It would take the Arab Spring—and not anything about the American global war on terror—to finally unseat the first and only president of the country, Ali Abdullah Saleh. That has been followed by a never-ending civil war and Saudi (and Gulf state) intervention, turning the country into a humanitarian disaster and a basket case. Saleh was killed by a sniper in December 2017.