43* (6 page)

“February sixteenth,” Clarke said.

“Now,” Gore went on, “I gather there’s been some turf fighting going on between CIA
and the Air Force: who’s going to pay, who will take responsibility if something goes
wrong, some talk about arming the Predators ‘over my dead body.’ So here’s the policy:
CIA and Air Force will split the cost; if necessary, we’ll find some money in a supplemental
fund. Lord knows the surplus is big enough. And I will take responsibility.”

“With respect, Mr. President,” Secretary of State Holbrooke interrupted. “We have
no idea how many civilians—women, children—may be around bin Laden at any time. And
we’re still getting grief from the Chinese for hitting their embassy in Belgrade back
in ’99.”

“Yes, Dick, I remember. I also remember what Deputy CIA Director James Pavitt said
at that transition briefing: ‘Bin Laden is one of
the
gravest threats to the country.’ ”

“He also said taking him out wouldn’t stop the threat,” Tenet said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Clarke interjected, “but he also said it would have an impact.
Osama loves to say that people ‘back a strong horse over the weak horse.’ He points
to everything from Vietnam to Reagan pulling troops out of Beirut in ’83 to leaving
Somalia after Black Hawk Down in ’93 to the fact that we did nothing after the
Cole
bombing last year, proving to him that the West is weak. I think a Hellfire missile
down his throat would be a powerful educational tool.”

“Well,” Gore said, “as George Bush once said, ‘I aspire to be the education president.’
So … ”

Three weeks later, in the Nevada desert, a missile fired from a Predator hit and leveled
a brick structure; few of those involved knew that it was a duplicate of bin Laden’s
home in Kandahar. Just two weeks later, on April 15, a Predator located bin Laden
and a group of Al Qaeda operatives at the same Tarnak Farms complex where another
Predator had located him seven months earlier. But this drone was armed, and the Hellfire
it launched from four miles away hit its target in little more than a minute.

The kill was confirmed: Osama bin Laden was dead.

Now that a Predator drone had removed bin Laden for good, there was a sense among
some in the counterterrorism world that Al Qaeda’s morale had been crippled, that
with the head of the snake cut off, the body would soon die.

But Richard Clarke, for one, was far less optimistic. That same toxic stew of bureaucratic
inertia, turf wars, risk-averse indecision, and pure ignorance that had delayed the
strike against bin Laden for so long was a constant factor in the broader terrorism
arena. The CIA held its information in an iron grip, rarely sharing what it knew with
the FBI, Customs, or Immigration and Naturalization. For its part, the bureau, hobbled
by a misunderstood Justice Department edict, operated with a “wall” that barred intelligence-gathering
agents from sharing what they knew with criminal investigators. Moreover, their computers
were years, perhaps decades, behind the times, incapable of even performing a simple
Internet search. With such handicaps, it was a matter of blind luck—and the intuition
of a customs official at a border crossing in Washington State—that had stopped Al
Qaeda’s Millennium attack on LAX. When Ahmed Ressam was captured, Clarke and his team
had reached an inescapable, unsettling conclusion:
Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the United States, and attacks on the
U.S. are likely.

What Clarke could not have known—what no one could have known—was that a decision
by President Gore to make life a little more comfortable for Americans would make
a coming strike immeasurably worse than it might have otherwise been.

“The only thing less reliable than an alarm clock that never rings,” one of Richard
Clarke’s aides snapped, “is an alarm clock that always rings.” And in the spring and
summer of 2001, the clock was never silent. Al Qaeda was preparing to strike Israel,
Bahrain,
and
Kuwait; they were aiming at the G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa; there were reports
of a massive strike on U.S. soil planned for the Fourth of July holiday, and the FAA
was also warning of possible “airline hijackings to free terrorists incarcerated in
the United Sates,” but the assumption was that those attacks would take place overseas,
and the agency specifically added that there was “no indication that any group is
currently thinking” of suicide hijackings.

Far more significant, however, was a mind-set across the bureaucratic universe that
ensured that, for all of President Gore’s urgent entreaties to take the terrorism
threat seriously, such pleas would make little difference. The inherent nature of
bureaucracy is that it is self-protective, risk-averse, governed by a powerful set
of rules: protect your turf, cover your ass, resist all pressures to deviate from
below or above. To reveal what you know is to risk the loss of authority, manpower,
and funding.

For example, beginning in President Clinton’s second term, the FBI and the CIA had
mistakenly interpreted a Justice Department ruling to mean that a “wall” had been
created between intelligence gathering and criminal investigation. The CIA could not
share what it had learned about the suspicious activities of a potential terrorist
with an FBI agent pursuing criminal leads; in fact, even within the bureau itself,
that nonexistent wall governed behavior. (One agency official warned FBI agents that
breaching the wall would be “a career-ender.”)

That wall had permitted two Al Qaeda operatives to escape the attention of the INS
when they applied for visas to enter the United States. It meant that Tom Wilshire,
the CIA’s representative to the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Center, was
specifically
not
allowed to tell his FBI counterparts that a known Al Qaeda operative was in the United
States. And why was this operative allowed to travel to and remain in America? Because
the CIA never gave his name to the State Department or the INS—nor did it let the
FBI know that he frequently called a pay phone in Yemen that was a central switching
station for Al Qaeda. It was the kind of information that would have allowed the FBI
or the immigration authorities to find the links that might have led them to uncover
what these men and their colleagues were up to.

Not that the FBI was a model of openness or flexibility. Rather, as journalist Lawrence
Wright had once noted, it was “a timid bureaucracy that abhorred powerful individuals;
it was known for its brutal treatment of employees who were ambitious, or who fought
conventional wisdom.” By spring 2001, the bureau had effectively forced from its ranks
New York agent John O’Neill, a flamboyant, ambitious, sometimes reckless figure who
had been assailing headquarters for years about Al Qaeda’s intentions. It was also
an agency without a permanent chief: Longtime director Louis Freeh had resigned, and
the Gore White House was looking for a replacement. (They briefly considered New York
mayor Rudy Giuliani, a strong-willed figure with a law enforcement background, but
his recent messy separation from his wife and a bout with prostate cancer made that
choice problematic. They soon settled on New York City police commissioner Bernard
Kerik—with his blue-collar upbringing and military-police background, he seemed a
much safer choice.)

There were more missed warning signs. When agents in Phoenix sent headquarters a memo—
why,
they asked,
are so many men of Middle Eastern origin enrolled in flight schools in the U.S.?
—the memo never made its way up the chain of command.

And then, in the middle of August, the United States caught a break, when the demands
of President Gore and counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke penetrated the bureaucracy
and gave the country one last chance.

And they came close, so very close.

Neila James was beginning to wonder whether she had made the right choice.

It was 2 p.m. on Friday, August 31, and while every corridor of every building in
Washington was filled with government workers fleeing for the Labor Day weekend, Neila
was at her desk in the cramped burrow she shared with two other employees in the NSC’s
Counterterrorism Security Group, facing a small mountain of paper and a computer file
jammed with reports from half a dozen agencies. She had drawn the short straw this
holiday weekend, consigned to an effort to catch up with the flood of information,
most of it useless, about Al Qaeda—rumors, threats, reported movements, hints of
something, anything.

It was the last place she would have expected herself to be when she entered Yale
Law School in 1998; public interest law was her focus, maybe the environment, perhaps
women’s issues. Then, in December 2000, the USS Cole was bombed. One of the victims
was her cousin Tom, her favorite relative, with a puckish sense of humor and a talent
for the guitar. When she visited him in the hospital—blind, his hands blown away—her
anger was visceral, and so was her reaction:
I want to find the bastards who did this.
Once she set her sights on Richard Clarke’s operation, the strong recommendations
of the Yale Law faculty percolated up the transition team, and Neila James signed
on to Clarke’s operation. She had no doubt about the importance of the work; everyone
in the field was gripped by the certain conviction that something genuinely terrifying
was in the works—“another Hiroshima,” one jihadist had boasted on an intercepted phone
call. But no one knew what or where or when, which made the meticulous review of every
scrap of data necessary, and incredibly frustrating—especially when there was a beach
house down in Rehoboth where her friends would be partying away the long weekend.
And for the next hour she forced herself to scan every cable, e-mail, and memo, no
matter how insignificant it seemed: an overheard conversation in a Hamburg bookstore;
surveillance reports on potential homegrown terrorists, frustrated FBI agents in Minnesota,
urgently requesting permission to search a computer.

James looked more closely at the request.
This may be worth a second look,
she thought.

The computer belonged to thirty-three-year-old Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen
of Moroccan descent who had spent the past six months at flight training schools in
Norman, Oklahoma, and now at the Pan Am International Flight Academy, in Eagan, Minnesota.
In his application to the school, Moussaoui had written in fractured English, “I would
like to fly in a professional-like manner one of the big airliners. I have to make
my mind which … the level I would like to access is to be able to take off and land,
to handle navigation … ”

Well, he wouldn’t be the first indolent playboy to treat flight training as a sport.
But there was something about him—his eagerness to work the flight simulator, his
utter lack of even basic aircraft knowledge. His instructors were uneasy enough to
contact the FBI. On August 16, 2001, FBI and INS agents arrested Moussaoui for immigration
violations. When they found flight simulators, airline schedules, and a raft of other
material, they asked FBI headquarters, in Washington, for permission to search Moussaoui’s
computer. Headquarters quickly declined the request—not enough probable cause. Seventy
messages were sent, more and more urgently asking for permission. Said one exasperated
agent, “I’m trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World
Trade Center!”

“That’s not going to happen,” came the reply.

It took three minutes for Neila James to print out the key exchanges, race through
the corridors of the Counterterrorism Security Group’s headquarters, and burst breathlessly
into Richard Clarke’s office, where she found the director shutting down his computer
and preparing for a couple of days off during the long weekend.

“Unless you’re about to tell me you’ve found an e-mail detailing an Al Qaeda attack
tomorrow afternoon, I’m not interested,” Clarke told her. He and his staff had grown
so accustomed to late-breaking crises exploding on the eve of a weekend that they
had come to label the lost weekends “the Friday Follies.”

“Yes, you are,” James said.

Clarke snatched the papers out of her hand and glanced at them impatiently. Then he
sat down slowly, read for a moment, and picked up the phone to cancel his weekend
plans.

Within an hour, a bulletin went out from Clarke to every agency even remotely connected
to terrorism and intelligence gathering:
Urgent you ask every asset any information RE: Zacarias Moussaoui, training at flight
school in minnesota. Report any data … repeat any data … directly to Clarke immediately.

And if there had been time, even a little more time, that request might have changed
everything.

But it was Friday afternoon, Labor Day weekend, and the agencies of government, like
most of the country, were already shutting down the engines, turning off the lights,
and heading to the beach, the mountains, the backyard.

As a result, the FBI agent who had been working with Ahmed Ressam was away for a few
days; Ressam, the would-be Millennium bomber at LAX, had been cooperating with the
feds for months; he knew about Moussaoui, and the link between Ressam and Moussaoui
would have been more than enough to establish probable cause to search his computer;
that search, in turn, would have opened up a world of connection between Moussaoui
and Al Qaeda. But the agent wouldn’t even see Clarke’s bulletins until Thursday, September
6. He had no reason to think Ressam had any connection to Moussaoui—and wouldn’t learn
of that link until late in the afternoon on September 10. He dispatched a message
to Clarke’s office, which arrived on the director’s desk fifteen minutes after he
had gone home for the night.

Meanwhile, the FBI deputy director who had repeatedly denied the Minnesota office
permission to search the computer pushed back hard against Clarke when he was reached
over the weekend, raising the specter of racial profiling, lawsuits, and the “wall”
(which did not in fact exist) that kept intelligence and criminal agents from communicating
with one another.