Tag: CIA

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.”

14 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
Ahmed Ressam

 

Ahmed Ressam, traveling on a Canadian passport under the name of Benni Antoine Noris, is arrested at Port Angeles, Washington at the U.S.-Canadian border. His car contains bomb-making chemicals and detonator components and he is entering the U.S. with the intention of blowing up a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve.

Algerian native Ahmed Ressam is later found to have trained in Afghanistan al Qaeda camps in Khalden and Darunta, receiving instructions on bomb making and probably the Los Angeles assignment. His case involved terrible failures by French and Canadian authorities. Ressam managed to initially fly from France to Montreal using a photo-substituted French passport under another false name, that of Tahar Medijadi. Under questioning in Canada, he admitted that the passport was fraudulent and claimed political asylum. He was released pending a hearing, which he failed to attend. He was then arrested four times for pick-pocketing, usually from tourists, but was never jailed nor deported.

Ressam eventually obtained his genuine Canadian passport through a document vendor who stole a blank baptismal certificate from a Catholic church. He used the passport to travel to Pakistan, and from there to Afghanistan for his training, returning to Canada before attempting to enter the United States.

Though the CIA and others in the Clinton administration would later crow about the capture of Ressam, his arrest in Port Angeles was completely by chance, due to the work of an individual customs agent on the spot (who had never received any terrorist warnings from higher headquarters or Washington).

“In looking back,” George Tenet later wrote, “much more should have been made about the significance of this event. While Ressam’s plot was foiled, his arrest signaled that al Qaeda was coming here.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 126)

10 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
John Deutch

 

CIA director John Deutch, brought over from the Pentagon in May to replace James Woolsey, who had resigned during Christmas, insults his own Agency, sort of setting the stage for a rocky tenure and the ascension of George Tenet.

The New York Times quotes Deutch slamming his own people, comparing CIA operations officers to military officers. “They certainly are not as competent, or as understanding of what their relative role is and what their responsibilities are,” Deutch says. Within six month, the rumor mill begins whispering that Deutch—scornful of his own people, aloof and technocratic—would be departing at the end of the year for the top job at the Pentagon (and indeed he stepped down on December 15, a year after he made his remarks.)

George Tenet, then Deutch’s deputy, disingenuously writes later that Deutch “abruptly resigned” when in fact he maneuvered behind the scenes to unseat Deutch and become director. (At the Center of the Storm, p. 5)

Deutch never got the Pentagon job, and in the ultimate act of revenge, CIA counterintelligence goons later pulled the former director’s security clearance for improperly handling classified material on his home computer.

9 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Fahd al Quso

 

Another missed opportunity occurs to expose the 9/11 plotters. Fahd al-Quso, an al Qaeda operative, is arrested in Yemen. In addition to being involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, al-Quso was at a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia also attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the San Diego duo who would go on to become hijacker “musclemen” on 9/11.

The FBI tries to get direct access to al-Quso after his arrest but is thwarted by the government of Yemen. (He is finally interrogated days after 9/11 and reveals his presence in Malaysia in January 2000.)

The CIA write in a December 2000 cable it had learned that al-Quso had received $7,000 from someone named Ibrahim, which he delivered to “Khallad” in Southeast Asia. They incorrectly identify this “Khalled” as Khalid al-Mihdhar. Khallad turns out to be Walid Muhammad Salih bin Mubarak bin Attash, currently in Guantanamo detention camp, and a close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

7 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

CIA director George Tenet gives a presentation on “What U.S. Intelligence Does for You” at a town hall in Los Angeles. The Millennium threat scare and the Y2K rollover now behind the threat watchers, Tenet is all swagger and promotion.

“We have, since July 1998,” Tenet boasted, “in partnership with governments around the world, helped deliver to justice more than two dozen terrorists—more than half of whom were linked to Usama bin Laden. These actions have shattered terrorist cells and networks, disrupted terrorist plans, and—in some cases—prevented terrorist attacks from taking place.”

It is a speech that one gets the sense could be delivered any day or any year, that typical happy talk of government which pretends real progress, and even resolution of problems, when in fact there is no true progress towards eliminating terrorism or even diminishing the size of the terrorist armies that would wish us harm.

6 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Further increasing the level of anxiety about terrorist attacks during the Millennium transition, Jordanian authorities arrest 16 alleged terrorists who were accused of planning attacks on the John the Baptist’s shrine on the Jordan River and the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman. George Tenet later wrote: “The Jordanian intelligence service, through its able chief, Samikh Battikhi, told us that individuals on the team had direct links to Usama bin Ladin.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 125)

The CIA Counterterrorist Center circulates an intelligence report, according to Tenet: “accepting the theory that UBL [Osama bin Laden] wants to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive panic, and score a psychological victory, then UBL may be seeking to attack between 5 and 15 targets on the Millennium. Because the U.S. is UBL’s ultimate goal… we must assume that several of these targets will be in the U.S. …”

Over the next weeks, the CIA and allied intelligence services would launch operations in 55 countries against 38 separate targets to disrupt plots in the making and to arrest terrorists under surveillance. But there is no question that once the Millennium passed without incident, the intensity of these efforts would generally decline. And they had little impact on al Qaeda central.

Of note, the same Radisson hotel was one of three hotels in Amman later attacked within a half an hour of each other on the night on November 9, 2005. There, suicide bombers killed over 50 and wounded over 100.

4 December 1998

Posted on by William Arkin
George Tenet

 

“We Are at War.” It is perhaps the most ridiculous memo ever written by a government bureaucrat, with neither the authority or the army to so declare. And it made no difference.

On the evening of December 3, CIA director George Tenet “furiously drafted” a longhand memo declaring war and telling his staff that “I wanted no resources or people spared in the effort to go after al Qaeda.”

“We must now enter a new phase in our effort against Bin Ladin,” Tenet wrote in the top-secret memo that circulated the next day. “We all acknowledge that retaliation [for American cruise missile attacks] is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced.”

Tenet later writes: “I want [deputy CIA director] Charlie Allen to immediately chair a meeting with NSA, NIMA, CITO [our clandestine information technology organization] and others to ensure we are doing everything we can to meet CTC’s [Counterterrorist Center] requirements.”

“The 9/11 Commission later said that I declared war but that no one showed up. They were wrong.” (At the Center of the Storm, pp. 118–119)

3 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
President Bill Clinton speaks to US troops

 

At the end of a five-day European tour, President Bill Clinton gives the order for the first group of American soldiers to go to Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia. About 700 soldiers are slated to deploy as part of an international peacekeeping force.

“I have authorized the secretary of defense to order the deployment of the preliminary troops … to Bosnia as I said I would as soon I was convinced that the military plan is appropriate,” Clinton said.

The remaining 20,000 U.S. forces are to be sent after the planned signing of the Bosnian peace treaty on December 14. In total, 25 countries are slated to send peacekeepers.

“Our destiny in America is still linked to Europe,” Clinton said, sort of sad commentary on an America or two geographic realities—the European domination and the challenges everywhere else in the world. The CIA is already engaged in covert operations against al Qaeda (and the next day George Tenet would declare war) but the Middle East—outside of dealing with rogues Iraq and Iran and protecting Israel—barely gets a strategic consideration. Is American destiny linked to Europe? It is a question we could still debate today.

1 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The social media era hits the CIA, early. The Washington Post reports that the Agency fired four employees, disciplined at least 10 others and revoked the security clearances of nine contractors for exchanging “inappropriate” messages in Agency computer chat rooms. The disciplinary action is described as the largest in the agency’s history.

The Agency had created internal intranet portals for collaboration, including internal chat capabilities, and Agency employees started communicating internally from inside the network. Evidently the “inappropriate” messages—hidden from management—both included gossip as well as sexual comment and inuendo. With the incident, the Agency tightened up rules but the technologies changed faster than the enforcers could keep up.

And all that new-found collaboration? Agency veterans say that the demands of email and collaboration programs can be oppressive—just keeping up—focusing operators and analysts alike on administrative tasks and internal bureaucracy rather than the external mission. It is a problem that persists to this day—and obviously not just in government.

30 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
Abu Zubaydah

 

The so-called “Millennium Plot” is first detected, leading to the arrest of numerous plotters in Amman, Jordan. Jordanian intelligence uncovered the al Qaeda plot to attack the Radisson Hotel as well as other sites on the night of December 31/January 1, linking local extremists to Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda operative then-considered to be Osama bin Laden’s top terrorist planner.

When Zubaydah was apprehended in Pakistan in 2002 (and severely injured in a fire fight), he was characterized as “chief of operations” for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s “number three” with the assumption that he was the main 9/11 planner. He wasn’t of course—that was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But he would go on to be the first captive to be water boarded and tortured at CIA black sites.

As an interesting aside: after 9/11, many would report that Abu Zubaydah made a mistake and said in an intercepted telephone call that “the grooms are ready for the big wedding,” a tip-off which U.S. intelligence had already determined was a reference to an attack. (The Cell, p. 214) The 9/11 Commission reported, though, that Zubaydah actually said “the time for training is over.” (9/11 Commission, pp. 174–175).

Somehow then—and even now—terrorism experts think it is effective to stress that al Qaeda operatives make mistakes, or they don’t understand Islam, or were “failures”—such as that the Hamburg Three did poorly in pilot training—to delegitimize when none of those things seem to make a bit of difference in their ability and willingness to continue to attack. Nor do they dissuade others from joining their ranks.