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Missed chances in long hunt for bin laden { March 25 2004 }

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   http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/25/politics/25HUNT.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/25/politics/25HUNT.html

March 25, 2004
Missed Chances in a Long Hunt for bin Laden
By DAVID JOHNSTON and TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, March 24 — In 1996, the C.I.A. secretly created a special operational unit devoted to tracking a single man, a Saudi-born exile named Osama bin Laden, then living in Sudan and considered a major terrorist financier. By early 1997, the office, known as the bin Laden station, had concluded that he was also a terrorist organizer, based in Afghanistan, with a military committee planning operations against American interests worldwide.

"Although this information was disseminated in many reports, the unit's sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities," the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reported on Wednesday. "Employees in the unit told us they felt their zeal attracted ridicule from their peers."

What happened over the nearly five years from that moment until the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is the story of bureaucratic miscommunication, diplomatic dead ends, military hesitation, intelligence failures, political rivalries and policy miscalculations at the highest levels of two presidential administrations — a trail of fumbles presented in sweeping new detail in two days of commission hearings and four staff reports made public this week.

The commission's work provides the government's first comprehensive account of how the Clinton and Bush administrations assessed and responded to the growing threat presented by the bin Laden network before Sept. 11. Previous government accounts, and testimony by national security officials, focused more narrowly on specific failings of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

In the last years of Bill Clinton's administration, the commission's findings show, there were deep misunderstandings between White House officials, who believed the president had clearly authorized actions that would kill Mr. bin Laden, and C.I.A. officers who thought that they were only permitted to kill him in a capture attempt. There were a half-dozen frustrating efforts to use Afghan proxies to attack Mr. bin Laden, and a series of successively more ambitious plans for military strikes that proved unworkable, diplomatic pressure that failed and bitter disputes about how best to use unmanned Predator drone aircraft to gather intelligence.

In the first months of the Bush administration, the commission found, there was sharp skepticism about the Clinton approach — a conviction that it had "run out of gas," as Stephen Hadley, the Bush deputy national security adviser, put it.

There was also hesitation about how and whether to retaliate for the October 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer Cole, more debate among the White House, Pentagon and C.I.A. over arming the Predators with missiles, and repeated delays that kept a new policy for expanded action against Al Qaeda from being approved until Sept. 4, 2001 — just a week before the attacks.

As intercepts of reported threats against unspecified targets jumped alarmingly in June and July, 2001, the deputy director of central intelligence, John McLaughlin, told the commission he "felt a great tension" between "the new administration's need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency."

He also reported frustration that some policy makers in the new administration "who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation, though they were persuaded when they probed it."

In all the pages of commission reports, and in all the hours of testimony, one haunting reality becomes clear: Whatever the missteps of the government in the months and years before the attacks, there was always a lonely chorus of experts, mostly at lower levels of the intelligence community, warning that the worst could really happen, even if they did not know how, where or when.

As early as mid-1997, the commission found, one C.I.A. officer recognized that the intelligence community alone could not solve the problem of Mr. bin Laden. "All we're doing is holding the ring until the cavalry gets here," he warned his supervisor in a memorandum.

There were some successes: Foiled plots, economic sanctions and a freeze on the Taliban's assets. But through both administrations, and despite internal pressure from critics scattered around the bureaucracy, the efforts against Al Qaeda were more notable for their limits than for their reach.

"If officers at all levels questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy the policy makers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy," the commission's staff concluded, "the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to 9/11."

What follows is an examination of how this happened, based on the commission's staff reports and testimony from current and former officials.

Early Clinton Efforts

In June 1995, President Clinton signed a new policy redefining terrorism "as a potential threat to national security as well as a criminal act," and committing the United States to "apply all appropriate means to combat it."

But despite an escalating pattern of threats and attacks, the Clinton administration remained constrained by a parallel series of interlocking diplomatic and military considerations from dealing as aggressively as it might have liked with Al Qaeda, according to the commission reports

At first, the C.I.A. regarded Mr. bin Laden's move from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996 as a break. The agency had long experience dealing with tribal leaders since its officers ran an arms pipeline that supplied millions of dollars in arms used successfully against the Soviet invaders who in 1989 were pushed out of Afghanistan in a humiliating defeat.

By 1998, the C.I.A.'s special bin Laden unit had a plan: The agency suggested using Afghan tribal fighters to assault a terror compound where Mr. bin Laden was believed to be living with the assent of the Taliban government. He would be captured and transported to the United States. But like so many of its covert action plans, the bin Laden unit's proposal collapsed after months of discussion. The risk of failure was deemed to be too high and C.I.A. officials doubted the ability of their proxy forces.

The capture plan was just one of about a half dozen instances before the Sept. 11 attacks when the C.I.A.'s informants in Afghanistan provided enough information to consider attacking Mr. bin Laden. But each time, the operation was aborted. If intelligence was limited, so was diplomacy. In 1998, Mr. bin Laden issued a public call for any Muslim to kill any American, military or civilian, anywhere in the world. In April of that year Bill Richardson, then Mr. Clinton's representative to the United Nations, became the highest-ranking American to visit Afghanistan in decades and asked the Taliban government to surrender Mr. bin Laden to the United States.

In May, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia agreed to make a secret effort to persuade the Taliban to expel Mr. bin Laden to the United States or another country. But these efforts ultimately came to naught, as did diplomatic pressure on two successive governments in neighboring Pakistan, including a one-day visit by Mr. Clinton in 2000. "The Pakistani position was that it had to support the Taliban, and that the only way forward was to engage them and try to moderate their behavior," the commission staff found.

On Aug. 7, 1998, the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were attacked, and intelligence quickly pinned the blame on Mr. bin Laden. On Aug. 20, days after Mr. Clinton acknowledged lying about his affair with an intern, the president ordered cruise missile strikes, code-named Operation Infinite Reach, against a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in the Sudan. The missiles hit their intended targets, but neither Mr. bin Laden nor any other terrorist leaders were killed.

Still, the administration considered follow-up strikes, and its counterterrorism coordinator, Richard A. Clarke, drafted a paper for a political-military plan he called "Delenda," from the Latin "to destroy," envisioning a continuing campaign of regular, small strikes, whenever targets could be found. No senior officials agreed with him. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen argued that the terrorist camps were crude, and that further efforts to hit them without killing Mr. bin Laden would only make Washington look weak.

But there were other advocates of more aggressive action. Counterterrorism officials in the Defense Department, unaware of Mr. Clarke's plan, warned that while the terrorist threat had grown, "we have not fundamentally altered our philosophy or our approach" and that in the event of new horrific attacks, "we will have no choice, nor, unfortunately, will we have a plan." The paper wound up in office of an under secretary of defense, where no action was taken.

So cruise missile strikes became the "default option," the commission found, and were considered on at least four occasions — in December 1998 and February and May 1999. But they were always ruled out, apparently because of uneasiness about the accuracy of the intelligence, including concerns in one case that a strike might inadvertently kill members of the royal family of the United Arab Emirates at an Afghan hunting camp. After July 1999, there was no occasion when cruise missiles were readied for a possible strike.

Debates on a New Approach

By the late 1990's, morale in the bin Laden unit sagged, the commission reported. In June 1999, Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's national security adviser, said that covert efforts against Mr. bin Laden had failed.

In response, the C.I.A. installed new leaders at the agency's counterterrorism center and at the bin Laden unit. They proposed shifting away from a reliance on Afghan tribal leaders to creating the C.I.A.'s own sources. Another proposal, initially resisted by some senior officials, involved using unmanned Predator aircraft to fly over Afghanistan relaying video footage back to the agency.

The flights eventually began, and twice, the Predator's cameras recorded what appeared to be a security detail clustered around a tall man in a white robe who some analysts concluded was Mr. bin Laden.

Mr. Clinton's national security advisers told the commission that Mr. Clinton wanted Mr. bin Laden dead and legal advisers said that under the law, the killing of someone who posed an imminent threat to the country was an act of self-defense, not assassination.

But the commission reported that every C.I.A. official interviewed on the subject, including George J. Tenet, the director, said that they believed Mr. bin Laden could only be lawfully killed in one circumstance: if he died in an operation intended to capture him.

"Working-level C.I.A. officers said they were frustrated by what they saw as the policy constraints of having to instruct their assets to mount a capture operation," one commission report said, referring at one point to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance opposition in Afghanistan who was assassinated just days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"When Northern Alliance leader Massoud was briefed on the carefully worded instructions for him, the briefer recalls that Massoud laughed and said: "You Americans are crazy. You guys never change."

On Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombers in an explosive-filled skiff bombed the destroyer Cole at anchor in Yemen, and while evidence emerged that individuals linked to Al Qaeda had been responsible, clear evidence linking the attack to Mr. bin Laden himself was not forthcoming.

No decision on a possible retaliation had been reached by the time the Clinton administration left office. Mr. Berger told his successor, Condoleezza Rice, that "she would be spending more time on terrorism and Al Qaeda than any other issue."

The Bush Administration Mr. Berger was far from alone. In one previously undisclosed intelligence briefing after the election but before Mr. Bush took office, James L. Pavitt, a senior C.I.A. official, warned the new administration that Al Qaeda was "one of the gravest threats to the country."

For his part, Mr. Clarke, who was kept on as White House counterterrorism adviser, briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others, warning that Al Qaeda had sleeper cells in many countries, including the United States.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the commission that he was consumed by other military matters and "did not recall any particular terrorism issue that engaged his attention before 9/11 other than the development of the Predator unmanned aircraft system for possible use against bin Laden."

Although the Bush team took office only three months after the terrorist attack on the Cole, Mr. Bush's aides showed no more interest than their predecessors in the Clinton administration in launching a reprisal strike against Al Qaeda. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, said that by the time the Bush administration was in place, the Cole attack had grown "stale," according to the commission.

Instead of action and new initiatives, the Bush administration engaged in a lengthy policy debate. Mr. Bush's aides rejected most of the Clinton administration's ideas and plans as ineffectual or too narrow.

But evidence compiled by the commission suggests that before Sept. 11, the Bush team failed to put into place a comprehensive game plan of its own against the bin Laden network.

In March 2001, one commission report made public on Wednesday disclosed, Ms. Rice asked Mr. Tenet to prepare a new set of legal authorities that would expand the agency's powers to carry out covert actions in Afghanistan. Mr. Tenet complied, but told Mr. Hadley, Ms. Rice's deputy, that changes in authority usually emerged from a policy review.

In May, Ms. Rice recalled that Mr. Bush expressed frustration as Mr. Tenet repeatedly warned of terror threats in his daily briefings. At one point, the President expressed impatience with "swatting flies," and urged his advisers to greater efforts against Al Qaeda.

But Mr. Bush's aides were engaged in a lengthy examination of the government's approach toward Al Qaeda and Afghanistan — a review that went on unresolved through the spring and summer of 2001. By June, a draft of a presidential directive authorizing an ambitious covert action plan was circulating through the upper echelons of the administration — with no decision.

Some intelligence officials expressed frustration over what they viewed as the Bush administration's slow pace and its apparent unwillingness to grasp what they viewed as the extreme gravity of the threat. Two C.I.A. counterterrorism officers, who were not identified, told the commission that they were "so worried about an impending disaster" that they considered resigning in protest, a report said.

By midsummer 2001, the danger signs were growing. A commission report said that by late July, intelligence agencies were deluged with the "greatest volume" of reports hinting that "multiple, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attacks were being planned against American interests." They seemed to point to attacks outside the United States.

The C.I.A's counterterrorism center identified 30 possible attack sites abroad and began efforts to disrupt possible attacks — even as Mohamed Atta and the last of the Sept. 11 hijackers had safely arrived in the United States, all of them carrying visas issued by the State Department.

By August, the spike in threat reporting had subsided. Mr. Tenet said that the C.I.A. had concluded that whatever terrorist activity had been planned had been delayed. At the same time, a commission report said, a cabinet-level national security committee on Sept. 4 reached agreement on a new policy toward Afghanistan.

On Sept. 10, Mr. Tenet was formally advised to prepare a fresh set of authorizations to put into effect the new covert action plan that included operations to disrupt Mr. bin Laden's control of Al Qaeda — a plan that was expected to take at least three years.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company


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