Month: December 2020

31 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Y2K fever reaches its peak, having captivated the country—and particularly Washington—for the past four or five years on the uncertainty that computerdom will able to process information properly when the Year Two Thousand arrives.

The fear, worked on for months and involving billions of dollars, is to forestall the possibility that December 31, 1999 will be followed by January 1, 1900, thus disabling systems that depend upon time synchronization.

In Washington in particular, dire predictions abound of a digital Pearl Harbor, with the effects that airplane navigation systems will fail, that telecommunications will halt, that financial records will die, with trillions in assets disappearing. An entire industry forms to eradicate the problem of the Y2K bug.

Richard Clarke later writes of his experiences on New Year’s Eve: “In a vault just off the floor of the Y2K Coordination Center, we waited for midnight in Riyadh, then in Paris … I could hardly hear [FBI special agent] John O’Neill when I called his cell phone; he was at the New York Police Command Post in Time Square … At midnight I went to the roof to look down on the celebration at the Lincoln Memorial … At 3:00 a.m., we went back to the rooftop and popped open a bottle.” (Against All Enemies, p. 214)

30 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, is identified by an al Qaeda captive from a photograph and labeled an “associate” of Osama bin Laden.

He is subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury the next month. The FBI and U.S. Attorney do not really know who KSM is, other than as a financier of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and an accomplice in Ramzi Yousef’s activities in the Philippines. The indictment is sealed—secret—only to be opened once KSM is in custody.

29 December 1992

Posted on by William Arkin
Gold Mohur Hotel

 

Probably the “first” direct attack by al Qaeda on the United States occurs in Yemen.

Two hotels that cater to westerners are attacked, one at the Movenpick and the other at the Gold Mohur. Though directed at U.S. military personnel staging for operations in Somalia, the bombs kill one Australian tourist. In fact, the U.S. military are staying at a completely different hotel and the attack is barely noticed in Washington.

Two Yemenis, later found to have trained in Afghanistan, are eventually arrested, having been injured in the blast. Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attack in 1998.

28 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President Bill Clinton announces that he will not travel to North Korea before the end of his term, citing “insufficient time to complete the work at hand.”

White House national security adviser Sandy Berger and other White House officials were hesitant to have the president leave the country during the ongoing election dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Berger called it a “potential Constitutional crisis.”

Whether Clinton’s trip to North Korea would have achieved anything anyhow is questionable, but the precedent had also been set for an outgoing president not to leave new and pressing national security business for their successors. Hence the real reason behind not “retaliating” for the October attack in Yemen on the USS Cole: that the reverberations might have locked the new administration into some specific action.

27 December 1993

Posted on by William Arkin

 

In Egypt, an attack on a bus in old Cairo wounds 16 Austrian and Egyptian tourists. Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) claims responsibility. In September, the group warned tourists that they shouldn’t enter Qana province, which includes some of Egypt’s most famous sites. The first attack on tourists occurs a month later, killing one British national. Six more attacks on tourists—in Qana and Cairo—kill more than a dozen foreign tourists.

The Islamic Group’s “spiritual” leader is Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. The group would claim responsibility for the multi-year campaign of tourist attacks, including the November 1997 attack at Luxor that killed 58 foreign tourists.

25 December 1979

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Over a three-day period, beginning near midnight on Christmas Eve, four Soviet Army motorized rifle divisions invade Afghanistan as Soviet special forces seize airports in Kabul. The communist, exiled leader Babrak Karmal is installed as president.

It is the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, but also the birth of a new brand of Islamic fundamentalism not based on animus towards Israel. Over the next decade of fighting—devastating to Afghanistan and to Afghan fighters—al Qaeda is born. The CIA’s decade-long, covert-action support for the war against the Soviets reportedly involves billions in arms and support, much of it funneled through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The Arab migration to the fight—the holy jihad supported by a young Osama bin Laden—does not really get underway for another five years, but then thousands of volunteers make the holy pilgrimage to Afghanistan to fight the foreign invader, some joining al Qaeda as it later forms (in 1988) and some just jihadi tourists who return to their home countries of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

24 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
NSA

 

NSA reportedly begins placing caveats on certain raw Osama bin Ladin intercepts that precludes automatic sharing of the contents with the FBI or U.S. Attorneys.

These controls over dissemination were initially created at the direction of Attorney General Janet Reno, and applied solely to intelligence gathered as a result of three specific domestic-related intercepts that she had authorized. Because NSA decided it was administratively too difficult to determine whether particular intelligence derived from these specific surveillances was contained in finished reports, the NSA also decided to control dissemination of all its bin Laden related reports.

In November 2000, in response to direction from the FISA Court, NSA modified these caveats to require that NSA’s Customer Needs and Delivery Services group could make exceptions to share the resulting intelligence with prosecutors and FBI agents. This episode is often confused with the larger question of FBI and CIA sharing—the so-called “wall”—but really it’s related to intelligence from three al Qaeda suspect intercepts.

23 December 1998

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Osama bin Laden meets with a Time Magazine correspondent at his tented encampment in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

“Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so,” he says, referring to nuclear weapons.

George Tenet later testifies before the 9/11 Commission that that the CIA took notice of this December statement and sent out a warning regarding al Qaeda’s interest “in acquiring chemical and biological weapons and nuclear materials.”

22 December 1989

Posted on by William Arkin
South Yemen

 

Osama bin Laden approaches Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, head of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, with a plan to use Arab mujahedin from Afghanistan to overthrow the Marxist government in South Yemen.

Turki rejects his proposal, but bin Laden reportedly organizes fighters anyhow under the al Qaeda flag, and then (working with tribal leaders) makes a series of attacks in South Yemen. The attacks are so damaging and threatening that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh travels to Saudi Arabia to ask King Fahd to get bin Laden under control. The King then himself instructs bin Laden to stay out of Yemeni affairs, and Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz al Saud (then the minister of the interior) demands bin Laden’s passport.

Less than a year later, Iraq invades Kuwait and bin Laden’s views of Saudi Arabia are forever transformed, with King Fahd inviting U.S. military forces to deploy to Saudi soil—a sacrilege to bin Laden that represents a new set of “crusaders” entering the lands of Islam.