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The Counterterrorist Myth
A former CIA operative explains why the terrorist
Usama bin Ladin has little to fear from American
intelligence
BY REUEL MARC GERECHT
The Atlantic Monthly (August 2001)
The United States has spent billions of dollars on
counterterrorism since the U.S. embassy bombings in
Tanzania and Kenya, in August of 1998. Tens of
millions have been spent on covert operations
specifically targeting Usama bin Ladin and his
terrorist organization, al-Qa'ida. Senior U.S.
officials boldly claim-even after the suicide attack
last October on the USS Cole, in the port of Aden-that
the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation are clandestinely "picking apart" bin
Ladin's organization "limb by limb." But having worked
for the CIA for nearly nine years on Middle Eastern
matters (I left the Directorate of Operations because
of frustration with the Agency's many problems), I
would argue that America's counterterrorism program in
the Middle East and its environs is a myth.
Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's Northwest
Frontier, is on the cultural periphery of the Middle
East. It is just down the Grand Trunk Road from the
legendary Khyber Pass, the gateway to Afghanistan.
Peshawar is where bin Ladin cut his teeth in the
Islamic jihad, when, in the mid-1980s, he became the
financier and logistics man for the Maktab
al-Khidamat, The Office of Services, an overt
organization trying to recruit and aid Muslim, chiefly
Arab, volunteers for the war against the Soviets in
Afghanistan. The friendships and associations made in
The Office of Services gave birth to the clandestine
al-Qa'ida, The Base, whose explicit aim is to wage a
jihad against the West, especially the United States.
According to Afghan contacts and Pakistani officials,
bin Ladin's men regularly move through Peshawar and
use it as a hub for phone, fax, and modem
communication with the outside world. Members of the
embassy-bombing teams in Africa probably planned to
flee back to Pakistan. Once there they would likely
have made their way into bin Ladin's open arms through
al-Qa'ida's numerous friends in Peshawar. Every tribe
and region of Afghanistan is represented in this city,
which is dominated by the Pathans, the pre-eminent
tribe in the Northwest Frontier and southern
Afghanistan. Peshawar is also a power base of the
Taliban, Afghanistan's fundamentalist rulers. Knowing
the city's ins and outs would be indispensable to any
U.S. effort to capture or kill bin Ladin and his
closest associates. Intelligence collection on
al-Qa'ida can't be of much real value unless the agent
network covers Peshawar.
During a recent visit, at sunset, when the city's
cloistered alleys go black except for an occasional
flashing neon sign, I would walk through Afghan
neighborhoods. Even in the darkness I had a case
officer's worst sensation-eyes following me
everywhere. To escape the crowds I would pop into
carpet, copper, and jewelry shops and every cybercaf�
I could find. These were poorly lit one- or two-room
walk-ups where young men surfed Western porn. No
matter where I went, the feeling never left me. I
couldn't see how the CIA as it is today had any chance
of running a successful counterterrorist operation
against bin Ladin in Peshawar, the Dodge City of
Central Asia.
Westerners cannot visit the cinder-block, mud-brick
side of the Muslim world-whence bin Ladin's foot
soldiers mostly come-without announcing who they are.
No case officer stationed in Pakistan can penetrate
either the Afghan communities in Peshawar or the
Northwest Frontier's numerous religious schools, which
feed manpower and ideas to bin Ladin and the Taliban,
and seriously expect to gather useful information
about radical Islamic terrorism-let alone recruit
foreign agents.
Even a Muslim CIA officer with native-language
abilities (and the Agency, according to several
active-duty case officers, has very few operatives
from Middle Eastern backgrounds) could do little more
in this environment than a blond, blue-eyed
all-American. Case officers cannot long escape the
embassies and consulates in which they serve. A U.S.
official overseas, photographed and registered with
the local intelligence and security services, can't
travel much, particularly in a police-rich country
like Pakistan, without the "host" services' knowing
about it. An officer who tries to go native,
pretending to be a true-believing radical Muslim
searching for brothers in the cause, will make a fool
of himself quickly.
In Pakistan, where the government's Inter-Services
Intelligence Agency and the ruling army are competent
and tough, the CIA can do little if these institutions
are against it. And they are against it. Where the
Taliban and Usama bin Ladin are concerned, Pakistan
and the United States aren't allies. Relations between
the two countries have been poor for years, owing to
American opposition to Pakistan's successful
nuclear-weapons program and, more recently,
Islamabad's backing of Muslim Kashmiri separatists.
Bin Ladin's presence in Afghanistan as a "guest" of
the Pakistani-backed Taliban has injected even more
distrust and suspicion into the relationship.
In other words, American intelligence has not gained
and will not gain Pakistan's assistance in its pursuit
of bin Ladin. The only effective way to run offensive
counterterrorist operations against Islamic radicals
in more or less hostile territory is with
"non-official-cover" officers-operatives who are in no
way openly attached to the U.S. government. Imagine
James Bond minus the gadgets, the women, the Walther
PPK, and the Aston Martin. But as of late 1999 no
program to insert NOCs into an Islamic fundamentalist
organization abroad had been implemented, according to
one such officer who has served in the Middle East.
"NOCs haven't really changed at all since the Cold
War," he told me recently. "We're still a group of
fake businessmen who live in big houses overseas. We
don't go to mosques and pray."
A former senior Near East Division operative says,
"The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly
qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern
background who can play a believable Muslim
fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of
his life with shitty food and no women in the
mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case
officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do
that kind of thing." A younger case officer boils the
problem down even further: "Operations that include
diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."
Behind-the-lines counterterrorism operations are just
too dangerous for CIA officers to participate in
directly. When I was in the Directorate of Operations,
the Agency would deploy a small army of officers for a
meeting with a possibly dangerous foreigner if he
couldn't be met in the safety of a U.S. embassy or
consulate. Officers still in the clandestine service
say that the Agency's risk-averse, bureaucratic
nature-which mirrors, of course, the growing physical
risk-aversion of American society-has only gotten
worse.
few miles from Peshawar's central bazaar, near the old
Cantonment, where redcoats once drilled and where the
U.S. consulate can be found, is the American Club, a
traditional hangout for international-aid workers,
diplomats, journalists, and spooks. Worn-out Western
travelers often stop here on the way from Afghanistan
to decompress; one can buy a drink, watch videos,
order a steak. Security warnings from the American
embassy are posted on the club's hallway bulletin
board.
The bulletins I saw last December advised U.S.
officials and their families to stay away from crowds,
mosques, and anyplace else devout Pakistanis and
Afghans might gather. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad, a
fortress surrounded by roadblocks, Pakistani soldiers,
and walls topped with security cameras and razor wire,
strongly recommended a low profile-essentially life
within the Westernized, high-walled Cantonment area or
other spots where diplomats are unlikely to bump into
fundamentalists.
Such warnings accurately reflect the mentality inside
both the Department of State and the CIA. Individual
officers may venture out, but their curiosity isn't
encouraged or rewarded. Unless one of bin Ladin's foot
soldiers walks through the door of a U.S. consulate or
embassy, the odds that a CIA counterterrorist officer
will ever see one are extremely poor.
The Directorate of Operations' history of success has
done little to prepare the CIA for its confrontation
with radical Islamic terrorism. Perhaps the DO's most
memorable victory was against militant Palestinian
groups in the 1970s and 1980s. The CIA could find
common ground with Palestinian militants, who often
drink, womanize, and spend time in nice hotels in
pleasant, comfortable countries. Still, its
"penetrations" of the PLO-delightfully and kindly
rendered in David Ignatius's novel Agents of Innocence
(1987)-were essentially emissaries from Yasir Arafat
to the U.S. government.
Difficulties with fundamentalism and mud-brick
neighborhoods aside, the CIA has stubbornly refused to
develop cadres of operatives specializing in one or
two countries. Throughout the Soviet-Afghan war
(1979-1989) the DO never developed a team of Afghan
experts. The first case officer in Afghanistan to have
some proficiency in an Afghan language didn't arrive
until 1987, just a year and a half before the war's
end. Robert Baer, one of the most talented Middle East
case officers of the past twenty years (and the only
operative in the 1980s to collect consistently
first-rate intelligence on the Lebanese Hizbollah and
the Palestinian Islamic Jihad), suggested to
headquarters in the early 1990s that the CIA might
want to collect intelligence on Afghanistan from the
neighboring Central Asian republics of the former
Soviet Union.
Headquarters' reply: Too dangerous, and why bother?
The Cold War there was over with the Soviet withdrawal
in 1989. Afghanistan was too far away, internecine
warfare was seen as endemic, and radical Islam was an
abstract idea. Afghanistan has since become the brain
center and training ground for Islamic terrorism
against the United States, yet the CIA's clandestine
service still usually keeps officers on the Afghan
account no more than two or three years.
Until October of 1999 no CIA official visited Ahmad
Shah Mas'ud in Afghanistan. Mas'ud is the ruler of
northeastern Afghanistan and the leader of the only
force still fighting the Taliban. He was the most
accomplished commander of the anti-Soviet mujahideen
guerrillas; his army now daily confronts Arab military
units that are under the banner of bin Ladin, yet no
CIA case officer has yet debriefed Mas'ud's soldiers
on the front lines or the Pakistani, Afghan,
Chinese-Turkoman, and Arab holy warriors they've
captured.
The CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which now has
hundreds of employees from numerous government
agencies, was the creation of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge,
an extraordinarily energetic bureaucrat-spook. In less
than a year in the mid-1980s Clarridge converted a
three-man operation confined to one room with one TV
set broadcasting CNN into a staff that rivaled the
clandestine service's Near East Division for primacy
in counterterrorist operations. Yet the
Counterterrorism Center didn't alter the CIA's methods
overseas at all. "We didn't really think about the
details of operations-how we would penetrate this or
that group," a former senior counterterrorist official
says. "Victory for us meant that we stopped [Thomas]
Twetten [the chief of the clandestine service's Near
East Division] from walking all over us." In my years
inside the CIA, I never once heard case officers
overseas or back at headquarters discuss the ABCs of a
recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern
target that took a case officer far off the diplomatic
and business-conference circuits. Long-term seeding
operations simply didn't occur.
George Tenet, who became the director of the CIA in
1997, has repeatedly described America's
counterterrorist program as "robust" and in most cases
successful at keeping bin Ladin's terrorists
"off-balance" and anxious about their own security.
The Clinton Administration's senior director for
counterterrorism on the National Security Council,
Richard Clarke, who has continued as the
counterterrorist czar in the Bush Administration, is
sure that bin Ladin and his men stay awake at night
"around the campfire" in Afghanistan, "worried stiff
about who we're going to get next."
If we are going to defeat Usama bin Ladin, we need to
openly side with Ahmad Shah Mas'ud, who still has a
decent chance of fracturing the tribal coalition
behind Taliban power. That, more effectively than any
clandestine counterterrorist program in the Middle
East, might eventually force al-Qa'ida's leader to
flee Afghanistan, where U.S. and allied intelligence
and military forces cannot reach him.
Until then, I don't think Usama bin Ladin and his
allies will be losing much sleep around the campfire.
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