edited 3 March 2008
Franklin Freeman
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(Tenet deputy DCI, early 1995; acting DCI, 1996 (after John Deutch resigned); inaugurated DCI 31 July 1997.) Pragmatical/fudge face.
"Does America need the CIA?", November 1997. Speech chaired by ex-President Gerald Ford, attended by Tenet. Tenet embarked on a mission to regenerate the CIA. Tenet speech(es); another more explicit on new Pearl Harbor. (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn, pp.352-62)
The unit was formally known as the Bin Laden Issue Station, and codenamed "Alex", or "Alec Station". (It is presumably the "Alex Base" referred to by "Able Danger" liaison Shaffer — cf. below.) It drew on personnel from the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence community. It initially had about twelve staff, rising to 40-50 employees by September 11, 2001. (The Counterterrorist Center as a whole had 200 and 390 employees at the corresponding times.) By the latter year the station also directed 200 CIA officers worldwide.
(9/11 Commission Report, Notes, p.479, note 2 (to Ch.4, p.109) [HTML version]; Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), p.649, note 7 (quoting a CIA press statement).)
The Station was "staffed by CIA, [National Security Agency] NSA, FBI and other officers", Tenet later recalled;
The group's mission was [or was expanded to become] to track [bin Laden], collect intelligence on him, run operations against him, disrupt his finances, and warn policymakers about his activities and intentions. ...(Testimony of CIA boss Tenet to the 9/11 Commission, 24 March 2004, pp.4, 18)[By early 1999, the Station had] succeeded in identifying assets and members of Bin Laden's organization ...
Unlike other such units, the bin Laden task force [was] allowed to act something like an overseas station of the CIA and [did] not have to consult much with the bureaucracy in Washington.
[Peter L Bergen, Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2001), pp.126-7]
The unit's core personnel (according to Scheuer) remained at under thirty from 1999, with a "periphery" of several hundred short-term staff. Scheuer, who described himself as a conservative and instinctive Republican voter, became disillusioned with the Clinton administration's failure to decisively deal with bin Laden, resigning in 1999. This, however, was after Tenet had replaced him as head of the unit (with "Richard": see below, "The 'Plan' and the 'Planes Operation'"). (He was not much more complimentary about the Bush administration.)
(Julian Borger, "We could have stopped him", The Guardian [UK], 20 August 2004)
The Station soon began to pick up useful material. Jamal al-Fadl, who had lived in the US for two years in the mid-1980s, mainly in Brooklyn and Atlanta, had been recruited to the Afghan mujaheddin "through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn" (for which see this). He joined al-Qaeda in 1989 (Bergen calls him the "third member"), apparently in Afghanistan, and became a "senior employee" of the organization.
After embezzling $110,000 from Qaeda al-Fadl "defected". He contacted the CIA via the US's Eritrean embassy and, after receiving limited assurances from the US authorities, returned (after staying in Germany for a while) to the United States, in spring 1996.
For the next three years Jack Cloonan, an FBI special agent "seconded" to the bin Laden unit, and his colleagues baby-sat al-Fadl in a safe-house. From December 1996 Al-Fadl began to provide "a major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and intentions of al Qaeda"; "bin Laden, the CIA now learned, had planned multiple terrorist operations and aspired to more" — including the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium.
From 1996, the Bin Laden unit began to "find connections everywhere". ... "There was never a terrorist group which we knew more about in terms of goals, organization, method of operation [and] personnel, than Al Qaeda", Scheuer was to say later. "[B]y the summer of 1998, we had accumulated an extraordinary array of information about this group and its intentions."
Al Qaeda operated as an organization in more than sixty countries, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center calculated by late 1999 [a figure that was to help underpin the "War On Terror" two years later]. Its formal, sworn, hard-core membership might number in the hundreds. Thousands more joined allied militias such as the [Afghan] Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. ...Al-Fadl, who had "passed the polygraph tests he was given", became a key witness in the US v. bin Laden trial that began in February 2001. Here he "outlined the operational structure of al-Qaeda and the responsibilities of [its] various committees ...".
(9/11 Commission Report, chapter 2, p.62; [HTML version]; idem, chapter 4, p.109 [HTML version]; Peter L Bergen, Holy War, Inc. (op. cit.), p.65; Jack Cloonan interview, PBS, 13 July 2005 (edited online version); Michael Scheuer interview, PBS, 21 July 2005 (edited online version); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, Penguin, 2005 edn, pp.336, 367, 474; Jane Mayer, "Junior: The clandestine life of America's top Al Qaeda source", The New Yorker, 4 Sept. 2006)
The Bin Laden Station was reportedly disbanded in late 2005. (Mark Mazzetti, "C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden", New York Times, 4 July 2006; Associated Press, "CIA Reportedly Disbands Bin Laden Unit", Washington Post online, 4 July 2006)
On 4 December 1998 Director of Central Intelligence Tenet declared, in a memo to his senior deputies, "We must now enter a new phase in our efforts against bin Laden ... We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort." Soon after, Tenet designated the bin Laden threat at the very highest level. Tenet's "declaration of war" was not widely read in the intelligence community, and was apparently ignored; and finances remained tight.
(Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin, 2005 edition), pp.436-7 and 646 note 42; 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 11, p.357 [HTML version])
Nevertheless Tenet's declaration was the launch pad for what became known as "the Plan". "Early in 1999 Tenet ordered the Counterterrorist Center to begin a 'baseline' review of the CIA's operational strategy against bin Laden ... that spring of 1999 Tenet demanded 'a new, comprehensive plan of attack' against bin Laden and his allies." Tenet transferred Mike Scheuer from his leadership position at the bin Laden unit, replacing him with "Richard", a "fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor [of CIA HQ, where Tenet himself had his suite]. ... Tenet quickly followed this appointment with another: He named Cofer Black as director of the entire Counterterrorist Center." The CTC produced the "comprehensive plan of attack" against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and "previewed this new strategy to senior CIA management at the end of July".
(Coll, Ghost Wars, pp.451-2, 455, 456; Testimony of CIA boss Tenet to the 9/11 Commission, 24 March 2004, p.14)
Also in the winter of 1998-9, bin Laden gave Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) the "green light" for the "planes operation", and planning for what was to become known as 9/11 began "in earnest". Qaeda developed an initial list of targets, which included "the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center". The first candidate hijackers were chosen some time in 1999 (see below, "The Core Hijackers").
(9/11 Commission Report, chapter 5, pp.149-50, 154-5 [HTML version]. Based on "intelligence interrogations" of KSM.)
In [September] 1999, DCI Tenet unveiled the CIA's new Bin Ladin strategy. It was called, simply, "the Plan". The Plan proposed continuing disruption and rendition operations worldwide. It announced a program for hiring and training better officers with counterterrorism skills, recruiting more assets, and trying to penetrate al Qaeda's ranks [my emphasis]. The Plan aimed to close gaps in technical intelligence collection (signal and imagery) as well. In addition, the CIA would increase contact with [Ahmed Shah Massood's] Northern Alliance rebels fighting the Taliban. ...... In late October, a group of officers from the Counterterrorist Center flew into the Panshir Valley to meet up with Massood, a hazardous journey in rickety helicopters that would be repeated several times in the future. ... The Bin Laden unit was satisfied that its reporting on Bin Ladin would now have a second source. ...
Finally, the CIA considered the possibility of putting U.S. personnel on the ground in Afghanistan. The CIA had been discussing this possibility with Special Operations Command [SOCOM] and found enthusiasm on the working level but reluctance at higher levels. CIA saw a 95 percent chance of [SOCOM] forces capturing Bin Ladin if deployed — but less than a 5 percent chance of such a deployment. ...
... such a protracted deployment of U.S. Special Operations Forces into Afghanistan, perhaps as part of a team joined to a deployment of the CIA's own officers, would have required a major policy initiative ...
[9/11 Commission Report, chapter 4, pp.142-3 (HTML version). Tenet put forward the Plan on 16 Sept. 1999: ibid, Notes, pp.*** (HTML version)]
... [Cofer] Black and his new bin Laden unit [sic] wanted to "project" into Afghanistan, to "penetrate" bin Laden's sanctuaries. They described their plan as military officers might. They sought to surround Afghanistan with secure covert bases for CIA operations — as many bases as they could arrange. Then they would mount operations from each of the platforms, trying to move inside Afghanistan and as close to bin Laden as they could to recruit agents [my emphasis] and to attempt capture operations. ... Black wanted recruitments, and he wanted to develop commando or paramilitary strike teams made up of officers and men who could "blend" into the region's Muslim populations. [My emphasis.]In mid October, Pakistani generals Pervez Musharraf and Mahmoud Ahmad launched their coup against Prime Minister Sharif and General Ziauddin. Ziauddin, whom Sharif had newly replaced Musharraf with as head of the army, moved the CIA-trained commandos to Islamabad to protect himself and Sharif. But, according to accounts later circulated by the CIA, the commandos could see that Pakistan's army had turned against Sharif, and they melted away (headed for the hills, as a US official later put it). The Pakistani Tenth Corps detained Sharif and his allies. Musharraf rewarded Mahmoud Ahmad for his help by making him head of the ISI.Even with Tenet's support they struggled for resources. In the same weeks that he began to talk to the White House, FBI and Pentagon about what he called "The Plan" for revived global operations against bin Laden, Black was forced to implement a 30 per cent cut in cash operating budgets at the Counterterrrorist Center — including in the bin Laden unit. [This seems to contradict subsequent statements by top CIA men to the 9/11 Commission: though the CIA as a whole had been "badly damaged" by budget constraints in the years leading up to 9/11, the CTC had been excepted from cuts. (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 11, p.358 [HTML version]) So how do we account for Black's "30% cut" at the very moment he was plugging the Plan?] ...
In September [1999], Pakistani ISI intelligence chief General] Ziauddin flew to Washington to meet with Cofer Black ... and Gary Schroen. Nearly every politician in Pakistan believes, at least some of the time, that the CIA decided who served as prime minister in [the Pakistani capital] Islamabad. The Pakistani commando training accelerated, and the [CIA] brought the snatch team up to "a pretty good standard", as an American official recalled. The commandos moved up to the Afghanistan border. A staging camp was constructed. From [CIA headquarters at] Langley and [the CIA's] Islamabad station, the Counterterrorist Center was positioning its agents and collection assets and "getting ready to provide intelligence for action", the American official recalled.
(Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), pp.457, 481, 483)
"In the fall of 1999, the four operatives selected by Bin Ladin for the planes operation were chosen to attend an elite training course at al Qaeda's Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan." The commando course was especially rigorous, and "focused on physical fitness, firearms, close quarters combat and shooting from a motorcycle".
After completing this course al-Hazmi, Khallad and Abu Bara moved in early December 1999 to Karachi, Pakistan. Here Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) taught them basic English, how to read flight timetables and phone books (copies included those for San Diego and Long Beach, California), and to play flight-simulator computer games.
Al-Mihdhar did not join them, but in early January 2000 travelled from Yemen to the Qaeda conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he was joined by the other three.
On his way to Karachi from Afghanistan, al-Hazmi had spent a night at a safe-house in Quetta, where "an Egyptian named Mohamed Atta simultaneously stayed on his way to Afghanistan for jihad training". The Qaeda leadership substituted Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (originally from the United Arab Emirates) for the two Yemenis who had failed to obtain US visas. Their companions Ziad Jarrah and Ramzi Binalshibh also joined the conspiracy (but Binalshibh, himself a Yemeni, was subsequently unable to obtain a US entry visa).
(9/11 Commission Report, chapter 5, pp.155-8, 161, 168 [HTML version]. Based on "intelligence interrogations" of KSM. Ibid, Notes, p.492, note 41 [HTML version])
The 9/11 Commission's account seems to conflict with earlier media reports. These placed al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in San Diego in November 1999, when they moved into a ground-floor apartment at the Parkwood Apartments. Omar al-Bayoumi, a figure in the local Islamic community, drove them there from Los Angeles Airport and paid their first month or two's rent. (Amy Goldstein, "Hijackers Led Core Group", Washington Post, 30 Sept. 2001, p.A01; Goldstein et al, "Hijackers Found Welcome Mat on West Coast", Washington Post, 29 Dec. 2001, p.A01; 9/11 Commission, "Appendix A: The Financing of the 9/11 Plot", pp.138-9)
Saeed, the son of a wealthy Pakistani immigrant into the UK, became involved with al-Qaeda and the ISI during the 1990s. In 1999, according to the London Times, British intelligence supposedly offered him an amnesty and the chance to live in London a free man if he would reveal his links to al-Qaeda, but Saeed refused. Nevertheless, "There are many in Musharraf's government who believe that Saeed's power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA ...". In the two years before 9/11, Saeed lived "openly and opulently" in Lahore, Pakistan, and was able to visit Britain several times.
(Paul Thompson "Sept. 11's Smoking Gun: The Many Faces of Saeed Sheikh" (but now sadly lacking its photos), Center for Cooperative Research. Thompson's references are almost entirely mainstream media.)
Saeed Sheikh is, in many ways, mirrored by "9/11 mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM"), to the extent that one wonders if the latter has been used as a fictionalized form of the former. Exposed in the media as the financier of Mohammed Atta and the other "9/11 hijackers", Saeed was later superseded by KSM as "financier" (of similar sums of money). Saeed was also said to have helped train the "hijackers", a role subsequently re-attributed to KSM. And, at first said to be behind the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl (the investigative journalist who went to Pakistan to investigate terrorist links) Saeed was once again superseded by KSM as the kidnap/murder "mastermind".
(See my "Omar Saeed Sheikh — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed", and Thompson, "... The Many Faces ...".)
George Tenet's exhortations about bin Laden cascaded through the CIA. It was rare for the Director of Central Intelligence to personally invast himself in a single counterterrorist mission, as Tenet had done. The result during 1999 and early 2000 was a surge of recruitments of unilateral agents who could operate or travel in Afghanistan. It was the largest CIA drive for unilateral Afghan agents since the late years of the anti-Soviet war. ..."By 9/11, a map would show that these collection programs and human networks were in place in such numbers as to nearly cover Afghanistan", Tenet testified to the Congressional Joint Inquiry in 2002.
(Coll, Ghost Wars (Penguin, 2005 edn), pp.485, 495-6, and p.654 note 7. Tenet quotation from Tenet statement to the Joint Inquiry on 9/11, Oct. 17, 2002.)
Able Danger, a classified military intelligence group/operation, was set up in October 1999 "to identify potential al-Qaida operatives for U.S. Special Operations Command [SOCOM]". The group had a core of 10 staffers stationed at SOCOM headquarters (in Tampa, Florida), and was headed by Navy Captain Scott Philpott. (Robert Burns, Associated Press, "Pentagon finds More Who Recall Atta Intel", Washington Post online, 2 Sept. 2005) Within the next few months Able Danger identified about 60 suspects, in the US and abroad.
According to Weldon, Able Danger found a possible Qaeda cell in the United States consisting of Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar, and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Able Danger codenamed the potential cell "Brooklyn", the New York City district where it discovered them. Philpott, speaking through Weldon, said Able Danger had identified Atta by Jan.-Feb. 2000. (Jacob Goodwin, "Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?", Government Security News [8 Aug. 2005]; Kimberley Hefling, Associated Press writer, "Congressman: Defense Knew 9/11 Hijackers", San Francisco Chronicle online, 9 Aug. 2005; Philip Shenon, "Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks", New York Times, 23 Aug. 2005, reproduced on 9/11 CitizensWatch) (After 9/11, Atta and al-Shehhi were named by the FBI as the pilots of the planes that struck the north and south towers respectively of the World Trade Center; al-Mihdhar, known as one of the six organizers of the attacks, was "on the flight that hit the Pentagon", as was al-Hazmi.)
Major Anthony Shaffer was the liaison officer between Able Danger and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In a subsequent lengthy interview with Government Security News, Shaffer revealed that Able Danger discovered "five cells, one ... in the United States". (The interviewer says this, and Shaffer concurs. A "Brooklyn cell" is not mentioned; however Weldon has since confirmed that Able Danger identified "five Qaeda cells", including the "Brooklyn cell".) Shaffer makes the unclear statement that "We found two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, to include Atta". (He doesn't say whether one was the US cell.) Shaffer twice refers to Able Danger itself as a "cell", during the course of his long interview.According to conventional wisdom, from 1993 to June 2000 Atta lived in Hamburg, Germany. In 1999 he was joined from Bonn by al-Shehhi, when they set up the "Hamburg cell". In the winter of 1999-2000 they paid a visit to a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. (Immediately afterwards, they reported their passports stolen.) "Starting in 2000, the CIA placed Atta under surveillance in Germany."
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, having attended the January 2000 Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, entered (or re-entered) the US via Los Angeles. "They were identified by the CIA, but were not put on the terrorist watch list that is shared with other agencies."
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Atta, Shehhi and Hazmi were selected by the Qaeda leadership in December 1999 to train for and carry out the "planes operation". Osama bin Laden chose Atta to lead the group (which also included Ziad Jarrah and Ramzi Binalshibh). (9/11 Commission Report, chapter 5, pp.157-8, 166 [HTML version] This "information" is derived from intelligence interrogations of supposed Qaeda plot members captured after 9/11. It should be noted that such people are held outside of the law, otherwise incommunicado, and in dubious conditions. (Cf. chapter 5, p.146. [HTML version] However, as seems so often the case, the "intelligence" tales may indeed be a mirror of reality.)) Able Danger thus had remarkably rapid knowledge of the group.
It is a remarkable claim that (out of the subsequently purported "tens of thousands" of Qaeda affiliates [Cf. 9/11 Comm. Rept., chapter 2, p.67 [HTML version]] Able Danger was able to pinpoint "two of the three cells which conducted 9/11" (and not very many other people). (However, Shaffer's statement is unclear, and for all we can tell, Able Danger found all of the "9/11 cells".) Also notable is the fact that Shaffer speaks as if the "9/11 cells" were already formed by the winter of 1999-2000. This however conflicts with Weldon's description of the "Brooklyn cell", whose personnel cut across the "actual hijack teams" of 9/11.
In his interview, Shaffer insisted that Able Danger was a planning operation, not an intelligence-gathering one; "Once these [60-odd suspects] had emerged out of the data crunching, there was an interest to try to confirm or refute their linkage to Al Qaeda, and then do operations to further exploit them." "Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision-makers options for taking out al-Qaeda targets", he previously remarked (speaking anonymously at the time: "Pentagon team spotted Sept. 11 leader a year before attacks", Telegraph, 10 Aug. 2005).
In early 2000 Able Danger drew up a chart with the identities of the approximately 60 Qaeda suspects, including the "Brooklyn cell". The chart was presented to SOCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida, in the summer of that year.
In September 2000 Able Danger recommended that the information on the "Brooklyn cell" be passed on to the FBI, but "Pentagon lawyers ["working for Special Ops"] rejected the suggestion because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement". (Kimberley Hefling comments that this statement doesn't seem to make sense, because Atta et al were in the USA on visas; they did not have permanent-resident status.)
Shaffer told The New York Times that lawyers associated with SOCOM "did not want the information circulated because it would reveal the existence of the secret military intelligence project and lead to criticism that the military was collecting information on the American people". But Cmdr. Chope (of the Center for Special Operations at SOCOM), commenting in September 2005, denied that military lawyers had blocked information sharing.
Able Danger went out of existence when the planning effort was finished in January 2001, Chope also said. (Robert Burns, Associated Press, "Pentagon Finds More Who Recall Atta Intel", Washington Post, 2 Sept. 2005, 7am [EDT])
The winding-up of Able Danger dovetails in time with the new Bush administration's initiation of its "ambitious plan to eliminate al-Qaeda". (See the following article.)
Source articles for Able Danger
(in date order)Jacob Goodwin, "Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?", Government Security News (8 Aug. 2005)
Kimberley Hefling, Associated Press writer, "Congressman: Defense Knew 9/11 Hijackers", San Francisco Chronicle online, 9 Aug. 2005
Philip Shenon, Douglas Jehl, New York Times, "9/11 panel members call for new probe", San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Aug. 2005
Patrick Martin, "... Intelligence officer goes public in Able Danger exposé", World Socialist Web Site, News, 19 Aug. 2005
Jacob Goodwin, "Inside Able Danger — The Secret Birth, Extraordinary Life and Untimely Death of a U.S. Military Intelligence Program", Government Security News (23-24 Aug. 2005)
— Includes the lengthy interview with Anthony ShafferShaun Waterman, UPI, "Congressman doubts accounts ...", World Peace Herald, 8 Sept. 2005
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, "Inside the Ring", Washington Times, 30 Sept. 2005
— Weldon confirms Able Danger identified 5 Qaeda cells including the "Brooklyn cell"
See also:-
"Complete 911 Timeline: Able Danger program", The Center for Cooperative Research
"Able Danger", Wikipedia
Devlin Barrett, Associated Press, "Sept. 11 commission rejects Atta claim", The Miami Herald, 14 Sept. 2005
"Sources: Pentagon wants 'able danger' hearings closed", Fox News, 16 Sept. 2005
"Press Conference of Rep Curt Weldon: 9/11 Commission and Operation 'Able Danger'", Congressional Quarterly, reproduced by Centre for Research on Globalization, 17 Sept. 2005
— transcript (lengthy) of Weldon's press conferencePhilip Shenon, "Pentagon Bars Military Officers and Analysts From Testifying", New York Times, 21 Sept. 2005
"'Able Danger' Hearings", transcript, Online Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Pod Broadcasting System, 21 Sept. 2005
William Bender, "[Pentagon] Report: Curt [Weldon] wrong about Able Danger", DelcoTimes.com, 22 Sept. 2006
The attack on the USS Cole apparently came out of the blue. ... "With just slightly more skilled execution, CIA analysts later concluded, the bombers would have killed three hundred and sent the destroyer to the bottom." (Coll, Ghost Wars, 2005 Penguin edn, p.537)
A successful 9/11-style operation in October 2000 would presumably have caused a landslide for Bush and the Republicans in the November elections. Even the "poor-man's substitute", the successful sinking of a US battleship with 300 fatalities, would have been likely to produce a (un)healthy) majority for them. As it was, Bush scraped in in a controversial election ...
However Kie Fallis at the DIA, from "data mining and analysis", "predicted" in early autumn 2000 a Qaeda attack by an explosives-laden small boat against a US warship. And Able Danger uncovered data of increased Qaeda "activity" in Aden Harbour, Yemen. Able Danger elevated Yemen "to be one of the top three hot spots for al-Qaeda in the entire world" and, allegedly days before the Cole attack, warned the Pentagon and administration of the danger.
But the "warnings" were "ignored" ....
(9/11 Timeline for Able Danger, Center For Cooperative Research)