How Not to Catch a Terrorist
The December issue of The Atlantic Monthly publishes the most complete excerpts yet of a letter from a 22-year CIA veteran to the House and Senate Intelligence Committee. The author, the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, lists “10 instances since 1996, picked from dozens of others to protect classified data, in which the decisions of senior Intelligence Community bureaucrats–not legal ‘walls’, organizational structure, or inadequate budgets–have been at the core of our failure against Bin Laden.”
A few choice morsels:
1. Mid-to-Late 1996: CIA’s Bin Laden unit acquired detailed information about the careful, professional manner in which al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons … there could be no doubt after this date that al-Qaeda was in deadly earnest in seeking nuclear weapons. The report was initially suppressed within CIA, and then published in a drastically shortened form…
6. April-May 1998: The Agency’s Bin Laden unit was ordered disbanded and reduced to a small branch. …When [the Director of Central Intelligence] found out about this plan, he intervened in mid-May 1998. By doing so, the DCI preserved the unit and dodged the bullet of having to explain to the American people why the Agency thought Bin Laden was so little of a threat that it had destroyed the Bin Laden unit weeks before two U.S. embassies were demolished. Needless to say, the on-again, off-again signals about the unit’s future status made for confusion, distraction, and much job-hunting in the last few weeks before al-Qaeda’s August 1998 attacks in East Africa.
7. May 1998-May 1999: The CIA officers working Bin Laden at Headquarters and in the field gave the U.S. government about ten chances to capture Bin Laden or kill him with military means. In all instances, the decision was made that the “intelligence was not good enough.” …The truth has not been fully told about the chance to militarily attack Bin Laden at a desert hunting camp being used by wealthy Gulf royals; and our best chance to capture Bin Laden–an operation which showed no U.S. hand, risked no U.S. lives, and was endorsed by senior commanders of the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg–was cancelled because senior officials from the Agency, the Executive Branch, and other Intelligence Community components decided to accept assurances from an Islamic country that it could acquire Bin Laden from the Taleban. U.S. officials accepted these assurances despite the well-documented record of that country withholding help–indeed, it was a record of deceit and obstruction–regarding all issues pertaining to Bin Laden between December 1996 and May 1998. The makers of this decision ignored the extensive documentary record that showed nothing but uncooperativeness from this Islamic country.
8. August 1998: After the bombing of two U.S.-based embassies in East Africa, the senior CIA managers asked what the Bin Laden unit needed most to enhance the attack against al-Qaeda. I again raised our dire need for verbatim reports derived from electronic collection. These senior managers ordered this to be arranged. After receiving less than a dozen such transcripts the process stopped. Despite repeated requests, I failed to get the flow of data restored…
10. September 2004: In the CIA’s core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001. There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise among Directorate of Operations officers since 11 September … The excellent management team now running operations against al-Qaeda has made repeated, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more officers to work against the al-Qaeda–and have done so for years, not weeks or months–but have been ignored …
Full article:
The Atlantic Monthly
December 2004
“How Not to Catch a Terrorist”
By Anonymous
This particular Anonymous has since identified himself as Michael Scheuer, who also wrote this year’s Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and of 2002’s Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America.
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