Tag: CIA

27 January 1999

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

Five months after the African embassy bombings, the CIA issues its first major analytic report—“How Bin Ladin Commands a Global Terrorist Network” on the nature of al Qaeda, that it is present in some 60 countries.

“Usama bin Laden is the ultimate decisionmaker in the organization,” the classified report states. “He is directly involved in the planning of terrorist operations and oversees those in his group responsible for terrorism even when he is one step removed from the details.”

The report relies heavily on arrests made after the African bombings, as well as the defection of Jamal al-Fadl and the arrest of Khalid Fawwaz, bin Laden’s news media representative in London.

It concludes that the organization is capable of undertaking more than one terrorist operation simultaneously.

25 January 2001

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke sends an urgent memo to Condoleezza Rice and deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley warning that there are al Qaeda sleeper cells within the United States and of an impending terrorist attack on America soil.

In a grand strategy paper on dealing with terrorism, Clarke advocates targeting al Qaeda training camps in response to the October attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. He proposes “rolling back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years, proposes military action as well that would attack Taliban infrastructure. (At the Center of the Storm, p. 143)

Clarke writes that al Qaeda “is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy,” taking a jab at Rice’s concept of a “regional” solution to terrorism. He says that key decisions that had been deferred with the end of the Clinton administration dealing with covert aid to the Northern Alliance and the Uzbeks, to political messages to the Taliban and Pakistan, and new money for CIA operations need to be resolved regardless of larger policy.

Though the 9/11 Commission would say that Rice did not respond directly to Clarke’s memo and no principals committee meeting regarding al Qaeda took place until September 4 (911 Commission, p. 201), the truth was that Clarke’s memo presented nothing new and didn’t represent any new intelligence regarding the immediate threat. One can fail the Bush administration for not seriously engaging with the issue, but it is also the case that Clarke failed (as did CIA director George Tenet) to convince the new administration of the threat, later trumpeting so many warnings that they drowned the new administration. And in his January 25 memo, which the 9/11 Commission tartly labels “elaborate,” Clarke’s inclusion of his 2000 strategy and his 1998 plan annoyed Rice and Hadley, that it was both too stale and too narcissistic.

15 January 2000

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

The first two hijackers associated with 9/11, Saudi nationals Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, arrive in the United States, 18 months before the attacks. The two arrive in Los Angeles on United Airline Flight 2 from Bangkok, Thailand.

Despite CIA admission (see January 13) that al-Mihdhar, a “known” al Qaeda operative, is on the loose, neither is ever put on any watchlist—that is, until days before the attacks in August 2001. But the real problem here is how the two could live in the United States for so long, even while the CIA and FBI exchange hundreds of emails and reports about them. (And then al-Mihdhar will actually leave the United States and return on another flight on July 4, 2001, a far more troublesome lapse for the counterterrorism watchers.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar told immigration authorities at LAX that they would be staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles. The FBI later found that their names never appeared in the hotel’s records. Then the FBI searched the records of other hotels near the airport, as well as smaller establishments in Culver City, failing to find any trail of the two as they reconstructed the road to 9/11.

They are, in fact, picked up by an intelligence officer of Saudi Arabia and taken to San Diego, residing in the officer’s apartment from January 15 to February 2, 2000. But then that’s another story.

14 January 1996

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The special Osama bin Laden virtual station inside the CIA Counterterrorism Center (CTC) gets underway. The “virtual” station is similar to the virtual Iran station (located in Frankfurt, Germany) that was created because of an inability to have an actual physical station in Tehran.

But because the bin Laden “station” is not about a country, and it is in the backwater of the then secondary and unimportant counterterrorism portfolio, few pay much attention. If anything, it even has an opposite effect. Rather than creating a bin Laden czar who focuses the Agency’s attention, it is seen as a hotbed of obsessed extremists focused on a questionable threat. That legacy would persist even through CIA director Tenet’s December 1998 declaration of war against al Qaeda and up until 9/11—the station an epicenter of analysis (and obsession), but the actual action regarding countering bin Laden taking place in the physical Pakistan and Uzbekistan stations (and in Yemen and other country stations) where covert action is being undertaken.

13 January 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

A CIA operational cable, “Efforts to Locate al-Mihdhar,” is issued, admitting that “known” terrorist Khalid al-Mihdhar (spotted in the United Arab Emirates and in Malaysia, and then lost thereafter) is on the loose.

The CIA’s understanding of al-Mihdhar, and their evident lack of concern that the Saudi national possesses an American visa, is one of the great mysteries of 9/11.

The Agency sleuths state in their cable that Mihdhar flew to Bangkok, Thailand with at least two other al Qaeda operatives. The cable also speculated that Mihdhar met with an Iraqi Fedayeen Colonel in Malaysia, later found to be a case of false intelligence and mistaken identity. But the Iraqi connection would dog and confuse U.S. intelligence for another four years.

The CIA also speculated that Mihdhar was in Malaysia to discuss some kind of maritime attack plan (now known to be false), though “Khallad” (who was shepherding around Mihdhar and his partner Nawaf al-Hazmi) was later involved in the attack on the USS Cole.

8 January 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar leave Malaysia on a flight to Bangkok. It is the last time that the CIA “sees” the two. There is much written about the two: about the Malaysia meeting, about their visas, about intelligence not read, not passed on, and about mistakes in not recognizing their true purpose. It is worth a book in itself, but suffice it to say that the post-9/11 recriminations about the CIA not telling the FBI, and about the two not sharing information, is only a small piece of the multiple failures, ones that ultimately allowed everyone to say that domestic rules were to blame for the gigantic failure, rather than that the officers involved—and their bosses—just didn’t do their jobs, didn’t recognize the terrorists, didn’t understand the plotting, didn’t follow them into the United States, and didn’t, even a year later, see Mihdhar leaving the United States prior to 9/11 and then returning as a tourist in July 2001.

5 January 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The famous Malaysia meeting of “known” terrorists begins. Khalid al-Mihdhar, a Saudi national who was expected to be one of the 9/11 pilots, arrives in Kuala Lumpur from Dubai—going to Evergreen Park, a condominium complex 20 miles south of the city. There he is joined by Nawaf al-Hazmi, another Saudi (and another designated pilot); as well as by Walid bin Attash (“Khallad”), a bin Laden confidant.

The purpose of the meeting is still unclear, though the CIA was tipped off by Emirati intelligence that suspected terrorist al-Mihdhar was traveling via Dubai to an al Qaeda meeting. The Emiratis photograph his passport and provide it to U.S. intelligence—it contained a multiple-entry visa for the United States, something that no one seems to take note of until much later.

During the Kuala Lumpur meetings, Malaysian authorities provide surveillance and photographs of the participants. CIA officers in Malaysia write several contemporaneous reports over multiple days of an important al Qaeda meeting, and the meeting is prominent enough that FBI director Louis Freeh is personally briefed on February 6th. Somehow though, the FBI is never “formally” alerted as to Mihdhar’s American visa, and by the time the two (Mihdhar and Hazmi) fly from Malaysia to Thailand to Los Angeles, they are lost to U.S. intelligence, no one having thought of informing authorities to watchlist them.

Mihdhar and Hazmi would go on to San Diego a few days later and begin English-language and flight training. They would fail at both and were eventually converted into being “musclemen” aboard the hijacked airliners. There would be a last-minute flurry in August 2001 to locate the two.

2 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin
Niger Embassy in Rome

 

The embassy of the Republic of the Niger in Rome is ransacked and thousands of passports and documents are stolen.

Many months later, a set of documents—on Niger government letterhead—would emerge to indicate attempts by Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium yellowcake from the country. The supposed Iraqi pursuit of Nigerien uranium is one of the key pieces of evidence used in “proving” Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of WMD. It is also at the core of the later Valerie Plame affair, where the CIA-dispatched Joseph Wilson (the former ambassador to Niger, and Plame’s husband) to investigate whether Iraq indeed was pursuing nuclear materials.

The documents are later conclusively proven to be forgeries.

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.