Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror

303 Pages·2012·2.82 MB·English

by  Matthew M. Aid

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. Lipstick on a Pig: Warning Signs in Afghanistan
2. Liberty Crossing
3. The Sword of Damocles: The Continuing Travails in Afghanistan
4. The Root of All Evil: The Pakistani Problem
5. We Have to Kill Them All: Scenes from the Global War on Terrorism
6. Men of Zeal: Homeland Security and Domestic Terrorism
7. Distant Battlefields: Mission Creep and the U.S. Intelligence Community
Conclusion: The Past Is Prologue: The Lessons for U.S. Intelligence from Today’s
Battlefields
Acknowledgments
Notes
Plate Section
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
To my family:
Harry, Rita, and Jonathan.
This book would not have been possible without them.
I’m so cocky I could swagger,
Things I know would make you stagger,
I’m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger.
Boo Boo Baby I’m a spy.
—ANONYMOUS OFFICE OF STRATEGIC
SERVICES (OSS) OFFICER
Introduction
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is
fear—fear of the unknown, the complex, the
inexplicable.
—H. L. MENCKEN
After more than eight years spent looking for Osama bin Laden, the CIA finally
got their first break in the hunt for the al Qaeda leader in August 2010, when
Pakistani agents working for the CIA followed an al Qaeda courier from an
Internet café in the city of Peshawar to an isolated compound just north of the
city of Abbottabad, thirty-one miles northeast of the Pakistani capital of
Islamabad.
Abbottabad has been a military garrison town since it was established by the
British Army in 1853. After Pakistan obtained its independence from Great
Britain in 1947, the Pakistani military took over the bases that had formerly been
occupied by the British forces. Abbottabad is now the home of the regimental
depots and training centers for two Pakistani Army regiments—the Baloch
Regiment and the Frontier Force Regiment—with between two thousand and
three thousand troops in residence at these bases at any one time. Just north of
the city in the town of Kakul is the Pakistani Military Academy. The mysterious
walled-in compound was located on a dirt road less than a mile from the front
gate of the Pakistani Military Academy.
The CIA agents had no inkling at the time that Osama bin Laden and his
family were hiding in the compound, but the extreme security measures in and
around the complex suggested that someone important was hiding there.
As described in greater detail in chapter 4, the CIA had been searching for bin
Laden ever since the Saudi terrorist leader and up to a thousand of his followers
had fled across the border to Pakistan in December 2001 after the Battle of Tora
Bora. When bin Laden’s trail quickly went cold, the CIA changed its approach
and tried to identify the couriers that bin Laden was using to carry his messages
to his followers and sympathizers, reportedly including tapping the phones of the
Islamabad bureau of the Arab news agency Al Jazeera to try to identify who was
providing them with videotapes of bin Laden’s speeches. In addition, a number
of Pakistani journalists who were known to have had or suspected of having
occasional contact with al Qaeda were placed under surveillance by the CIA in
the hope that bin Laden or one of his lieutenants would contact them and lead
the agency to their hideouts. None of these surveillance operations yielded any
leads.
In 2003, a number of al Qaeda detainees, including al Qaeda’s operations
chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified the person they thought was most
likely Osama bin Laden’s principal courier: a veteran al Qaeda operative who
went by the nom de guerre of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. In 2004, another al Qaeda
leader who had been captured in Iraq, Hassan Ghul, confirmed the identification.
Years later, the CIA finally learned that al-Kuwaiti’s real name was Sheikh Abu
Ahmed, and he was a Pakistani national who had been born in Kuwait.
Over the next six years, agents of the CIA’s Islamabad station mounted a
dragnet looking for al-Kuwaiti inside Pakistan, even circulating a composite
photograph of the man to Pakistani intelligence and security forces. But the
search produced no results.
It was not until early 2010 that an intercepted cell phone call led a team of
Pakistani agents working for the CIA to al-Kuwaiti. The agents found him in the
northern Pakistani city of Peshawar delivering, according to an intelligence
source, a packet of materials to a Pakistani journalist known to be sympathetic to
al Qaeda. The CIA’s Islamabad station hastily put together a surveillance team of
Pakistani operatives to follow al-Kuwaiti, with orders that he was not to be
captured, and that the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, was not to be told of
the discovery. The surveillance team was ordered to closely monitor his
movements in the hope that he would lead them to bin Laden. He did. Right to
the isolated compound outside the city of Abbottabad.
One of the secrets coming out of the entire bin Laden affair is that over the
past several years, the CIA has secretly recruited and trained a small but very
capable cadre of Pakistani operatives, many of whom were formerly police
officers. These agents do much of the fieldwork inside Pakistan that the CIA
officers in the agency’s Islamabad station cannot do because they are under
surveillance around the clock by operatives of the ISI. These Pakistani agents
run agent networks, conduct physical and electronic surveillance, install
wiretaps, operate cell phone intercept equipment, and much more. According to
an intelligence source, they were to end up doing much of the work that led to
the killing of Osama bin Laden.
A team of these agents rented a house just down the road from the compound,
which they converted into a sophisticated clandestine observation post, complete
with infrared cameras capable of taking pictures at night, sophisticated video
equipment, powerful telescopes connected to the latest generation of digital
cameras, and cell phone intercept receivers. And they did all of this without
alerting any of the neighbors as to what they were doing inside the house.
The CIA was unable to determine who was hiding inside the compound other
than al-Kuwaiti and his brother, another longtime al Qaeda operative, and their
families, but all the signs indicated that there was someone else living on the top
floor of the residence inside the compound. The question was, who was he? By
mid-February 2011, intelligence from a variety of sources convinced Obama
administration officials that some senior al Qaeda leader was holed up inside the
mansion at Abbottabad, but no one was sure who it was. The betting was that it
was bin Laden.
So on Friday morning, April 29, 2011, Barack Obama gave the go order that
launched a commando operation with personnel from SEAL Team Six to attack
the Abbottabad compound; then the president left for a long-planned trip to
Florida. The level of distrust of the Pakistani government was such that the
decision was made in Washington not to tell the Pakistani government or the ISI
anything about the operation in order to ensure that it would not be compromised
by Pakistani officials sympathetic to al Qaeda.
Halfway around the world at Forward Operating Base Fenty, located on the
eastern outskirts of the city of Jalalabad in southeastern Afghanistan, five
helicopters set off on the beginning leg of the dangerous 150-mile flight across
Pakistan to Abbottabad. Three of the helicopters were huge CH-47 Chinooks;
each large enough to carry a Humvee jeep; they now carried a team of twenty-
five SEAL commandos who would act as a reserve force during the operation.
Two smaller UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters, fitted with the latest stealth and
noise suppression technology, carried the attack team of twenty-three SEALs
who would conduct the actual assault on the compound.
Even before Obama gave the go order, the U.S. intelligence community had
secretly begun deploying an array of collection platforms to monitor the
compound and the surrounding area. A top secret stealth unmanned drone based
in Afghanistan flew over Pakistan and took up station high over Abbottabad,
relaying an uninterrupted stream of video imagery via satellite to the CIA
operations center at Langley, Virginia, about everything going on in and around
the compound. NSA SIGINT (signals intelligence) operators based at Fort
Gordon, Georgia, were able to confirm that the flight of the drone had not been
detected by Pakistani radar operators.
The CIA surveillance team based just a few hundred yards from the
compound in their clandestine observation point watched the building with
infrared cameras and sophisticated cell phone intercept gear, while other teams
watched the front gates of the various Pakistani military bases and police stations
in Abbottabad and Kakul to ensure that the Pakistanis would not interfere with
the operation. SIGINT platforms based across the border in Afghanistan
monitored Pakistani military, air defense, and police radio traffic to determine
whether Pakistani forces posed any threat to the helicopter-borne commando
force.
At 11:00 P.M., Pakistani radars detected the five helicopters taking off from
Jalalabad airfield and heading in the direction of the Pakistani border. Then,
according to Pakistani military sources, the helicopters disappeared off the
Pakistani radar screens. How the U.S. military was able to hide the flight of five
helicopters across Pakistani territory to Abbottabad, then back to Afghanistan,
remains one of the great mysteries of the mission. In fact, the version of the
events of that spring weekend released by the government and corroborated by
various media accounts has been criticized for possible inaccuracies and elisions.
In all likelihood, we will never know with full certainty what happened from
April 29 to May 1, other than the basic reality of Osama bin Laden’s death.
Just before 1:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, May 1, 2011, the two Black
Hawks landed the twenty-three-man SEAL team just outside the eighteen-foot-
high walls of the compound. One of the Black Hawks suffered a catastrophic
mechanical malfunction and had to be blown up after the operation was
completed. It took fifteen minutes to storm the house inside the compound. Bin
Laden was killed on the top floor. The commandos then spent the next twenty
minutes going through the house seizing computers, documents, and anything
else that might be of intelligence value before loading bin Laden’s body and the
captured material into the helicopters and starting the flight back to Afghanistan.
The commandos spent thirty-eight minutes on the ground in Abbottabad; not one
of them got so much as a scratch to show for the ordeal.
The operation was immediately hailed as a resounding success for the U.S.
military and intelligence community. The Navy SEALs seized a huge cache of
documents, such as bin Laden’s handwritten daily dairy, which was found to be
filled with details of planned or ongoing operations. Also seized were five
computers, ten computer hard drives, and more than a hundred flash drives. All
told, intelligence sources estimated the take at more than 2.7 terabytes of data,
with 1 terabyte being the equivalent of 2,000 hours of audio or 220 million pages
of text. At the time that this manuscript goes to press, the analysts are picking
their way through this material looking for leads to current al Qaeda operations
or those still in the planning stage.
The victory may be a short-lived one. Some intelligence analysts in
Washington believe that bin Laden’s death signals the end of what is left of al
Qaeda in Pakistan. Others are not so sure. On June 15, 2011, al Qaeda
announced that its new leader was bin Laden’s longtime deputy, Ayman al-
Zawahiri. Born in Egypt, Zawahiri has been a member of al Qaeda for over
twenty years, serving as the organization’s ideologue and strategist. Analysts
have noted that Zawahiri does not have bin Laden’s name recognition or force of
personality, and his prickly nature and propensity for making decisions on a
whim have sometimes gotten him into trouble with his fellow al Qaeda
commanders. But a veteran CIA counterterrorism analyst stated in a 2011
interview that, despite all his faults, Zawahiri commands enormous respect
within the organization because of his managerial talent, his uncompromising
attitude, and his determination to continue the fight against the West.
But it probably does not really matter who is the new leader of al Qaeda. If
history is any guide, bin Laden’s death probably will not change much. The war
on terrorism will start all over again tomorrow, and will continue unabated for
the foreseeable future.