Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (52 page)
By the time Black officially took over at CTC, his nemesis, bin Laden, was a household name, publicly accused of masterminding and ordering the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than two hundred people, among them twelve U.S. citizens. Bin Laden left Sudan shortly after Black did, allegedly relocating to Afghanistan. Once a name known only in intelligence circles and in the Arab and Muslim world, bin Laden was now on FBI most-wanted posters. Among Black’s duties beginning in 1999 was overseeing the special bin Laden unit of the CTC, known as Alec Station—internally referred to as the “Manson family,” for its cultlike obsession with “the rising al Qaeda threat.”
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Black dove enthusiastically into planning and overseeing covert operations. “He would make pronouncements that were meant to be dramatic and tough-guy colloquial—to make you think, Oh, my God, this guy’s got brass balls, and he knows the score,” said Daniel Benjamin, head of the National Security Council’s counterterrorism team in the Clinton administration, in an interview with
Vanity Fair
. “He’d say things like, ‘No more screwing around. This is going to get rough, and people are gonna come home in body bags. That’s all there is to it. You guys gotta know that.’ He’d talk about body bags all the time.”
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Shortly after Black officially took over the CTC, the CIA made a damning admission to the White House in early December 1999. “After four years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Alec Station had yet to recruit a single source within bin Laden’s growing Afghanistan operation,” asserted investigative author James Bamford. “It was more than embarrassing—it was a scandal. . . . It was a dangerous time to be without intelligence. Within days, the 9/11 plotters began their operation.”
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While Black was technically in charge, he had only recently been named to that position, and he would later complain that he and his colleagues within the CTC were not given adequate support to take out bin Laden. “When I started this job in 1999, I thought there was a good chance I was going to be sitting right here in front of you,” Black told the 9/11 Commission in April 2004. “The bottom line here, and I have to tell you, and I’ll take part of the blame on this, I kind of failed my people despite doing everything I could. We didn’t have enough people to do the job. And we didn’t have enough money by magnitudes.”
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Black asserted that the CTC “had as many people as three infantry companies [that] can be expected to cover a front of a few kilometers” even though “our counterterrorism center has worldwide responsibilities.”
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Black said that before 9/11, when it came to “numbers of people, finances, and operational flexibility,” these were “choices made for us. Made for the CIA and made for my counterterrorism center.”
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There were indeed budget cuts happening during Black’s tenure—in 1999, he faced a 30 percent reduction in the CTC’s cash operating budget, including in the bin Laden unit.
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Some analysts, though, said lack of resources was not the heart of the problem. Rather, they say, it stemmed from Black and his allies’ strong emphasis on paramilitary covert operations over the more tedious work of infiltrating Al Qaeda or bin Laden’s circle.
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In 1999, briefing documents Black’s office had prepared for the Clinton White House acknowledged that “without penetrations of [the] UBL organization,” the CIA was in trouble. Black’s brief said that there was a need “to recruit sources” but added that “recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.”
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What was done (or not) about this problem would be the source of a substantial amount of finger-pointing after 9/11.
In the two years before 9/11, Black’s strategy to fight Al Qaeda focused on using Afghanistan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, as a launching pad into Afghanistan.
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Black clandestinely traveled to the capital of Tashkent and oversaw U.S. funding and training of an Uzbek paramilitary force that would supposedly try to kidnap bin Laden or his deputies through “covert snatch operations.”
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Uzbekistan’s dictator, Islam Karimov, was fighting his own war against Islamic groups in the country and was adept at using threats of Islamic rebellion to justify wide-ranging repressive domestic policies, including arresting prodemocracy activists.
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When the CIA came knocking, Karimov was happy to use the veneer of a war against bin Laden to justify covert military aid from Washington. While the CIA was able to use the country’s air bases for some operations and install communications and eavesdropping equipment inside Uzbekistan, the end result of Black’s covert U.S. support was that the brutal leader, Karimov, received millions of dollars of CIA money, which he used “to keep his torture chambers running,” according to Bamford. “And the commando training would be useful to continue the repression of women and ethnic minorities.”
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Karimov was also known to have political enemies boiled to death; a practice the British ambassador in the country said was “not an isolated incident.”
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Black also kicked up U.S. covert support for Ahmed Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir” and his Northern Alliance, which regarded bin Laden and Al Qaeda as enemies. On at least one occasion as CTC director, Black met face to face with Massoud—in Tajikistan in the summer of 2000.
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Black and his units’ heavy reliance on Massoud in confronting Al Qaeda was controversial—even within the intelligence world. Massoud’s forces represented an ethnic minority in Afghanistan’s complicated landscape and were based in the north, far from bin Laden’s main operations. There were also broader concerns. “While one part of the CIA was bankrolling Massoud’s group, another part, the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center, was warning that he posed a great danger,” according to Bamford. “His people, they warned, were continuing to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe. The British came to the same conclusion.”
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White House counterterror expert Richard Clarke opposed the military alliance with Massoud, describing the Northern Alliance as “drug runners” and “human rights abusers.”
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Black, though, told his colleagues that this support was about “preparing the battlefield for World War Three.”
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Massoud would not live to see it, though. He was assassinated, allegedly by Al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists, on September 9, 2001.
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During this time, Black was also pressing the Air Force to accelerate its production of an unmanned Predator spy drone that could be equipped with Hellfire missiles to launch at bin Laden and his lieutenants.
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Some former counterterrorism officials have alleged that during Black’s time at CTC, there was more interest in using Al Qaeda to justify building up the bureaucracy of the CIA’s covert actions hub, the Directorate of Operations, than the specific task of stopping bin Laden. “Cofer Black, he arrived, and he was the man, he was the pro from the D.O.,” said veteran CIA official Michael Scheuer, who headed the bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999 before Black’s appointment.
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Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told
Vanity Fair,
“There’s some truth to the fact that they didn’t have enough money, but the interesting thing is that they didn’t put any of the money they had into going after al-Qaeda.” Clarke alleged, “They would say ‘Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda’ when they were trying to get money, and then when you gave them money it didn’t go to al-Qaeda. They were trying to rebuild the D.O. [Directorate of Operations], and so a lot of it went to D.O. infrastructure, and they would say, ‘Well, you can’t start by going after al-Qaeda, you have to repair the whole D.O.’ . . . And what I would say to them is ‘Surely there must be a dollar somewhere in C.I.A. that you could re-program into going after al-Qaeda,’ and they would say ‘No.’ The other way of saying that is everything else they’re doing is more important.”
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The public blame war over who in the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton and Bush administrations was responsible for the failure to prevent 9/11 intensified when Bob Woodward’s book
State of Denial
was published in September 2006. In it, Woodward detailed a meeting that reportedly took place on July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with Black, then head of the CTC, at CIA headquarters. The two men reviewed current U.S. intelligence on bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Black, Woodward reported, “laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.”
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At the time, “Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.”
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After reviewing the intelligence with Black, Tenet called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from the car en route to the White House. When Black and Tenet met with Rice that day, according to Woodward, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.” Black later said, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
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On August 6, 2001, President Bush was at his Crawford Ranch, where he was delivered a Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It twice mentioned the possibility that Al Qaeda operatives may try to hijack airplanes, saying FBI information “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in [the U.S.] consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
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Nine days later, Black addressed a secret Pentagon counter-terrorism conference. “We’re going to be struck soon,” Black said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.”
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While the debate on responsibility for 9/11 would continue for years—with Clinton and Bush administration officials hurling stones at one another—it was irrelevant to Cofer Black in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Black found himself in the driver’s seat with a Commander in Chief ready and eager to make Black’s covert action dreams a reality. Black had long been frustrated by the restraints and prohibitions governing U.S. covert actions—namely a prohibition against assassinations—and the war on terror had changed the rules of the game overnight. “My personal emotion was, It is now officially started,” Black said. “The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go. And I just couldn’t wait.”
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In his initial meeting with President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, Black came prepared with a PowerPoint presentation, and he threw papers on the floor as he spoke of deploying forces inside Afghanistan.
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On September 13, he told Bush point-blank that his men would aim to kill Al Qaeda operatives. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black promised, in a performance that would earn him a designation in the inner circle of the administration as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.”
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The President reportedly loved Black’s style; when he told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the President said, “Let’s go. That’s war. That’s what we’re here to win.”
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That September, President Bush gave the green light to Black and the CIA to begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan. Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead. . . . They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.”
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Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture.
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Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.”
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Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!”
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As the United States plotted its invasion of Afghanistan, Black continued with his apparent fixation with corporal mutilation when he accompanied Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, to Moscow for meetings with Russian officials. When the Russians, speaking from experience, warned Black of the prospect for a U.S. defeat at the hands of mujahedeen, Black shot back. “We’re going to kill them,” he said. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.”
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Interestingly, the covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors, answering directly to him, rather than active-duty military forces. Black’s men used their contacts to recruit about sixty former Delta Force, ex-SEALs, and other Special Forces operators as independent contractors for the initial mission, making up the majority of the first Americans into Afghanistan after 9/11.
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