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Lebanese Hezbollah, the Shia group backed by Iran, coordinated suicide car bombings at the US Embassy in April 1983 and the Marine barracks in Lebanon in October. The barracks attack left 299 Americans and French dead; the Embassy attack resulted in 63 deaths, among them CIA personnel including one of the Agency’s legendary Middle East specialists, Robert Ames.
The Embassy bombing, at that point the deadliest attack on a US mission overseas, involved a bomb-laden van detonated by a suicide strike inside the Embassy. The barracks bombing, following so soon after, led to a US pullout of troops that had been part of an international presence installed to keep the peace among fighting factions in Lebanon’s civil war. The language of the time gave Americans a taste of the gap between their perception of the United States—a power that would intervene on the side of the good overseas—and local perceptions, where Washington’s influence and the US Marines’ presence was viewed as siding with one Lebanese faction over others in the country’s fractured political scene. America was part of a “crusader presence,” read one statement issued by the terrorists after the attacks.
Suicide bombings were a new phenomenon, and hostage takings soon also became prevalent in Lebanon. In March 1984, just a year after the Embassy and Marine barracks attacks, Hezbollah kidnapped William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Lebanon, dragging him from his car at gunpoint as he left his apartment building.
Buckley’s body wasn’t recovered for six years after his killing, when an anonymous caller gave police directions to a body dumped near Beirut Airport. Medical and dental records provided the evidence necessary for his identification, and his body came home in a flag-draped coffin. These events hit particularly close to home at CIA headquarters.
Buckley’s death became one of the foundational events that led the Agency’s leaders to concentrate attention on terrorism, starting during the Reagan years. In 1986, the Agency reorganized to fight this new threat, designing a different bureaucratic structure to counter Hezbollah. The Counterterrorism (originally Counterterrorist) Center (CTC) was born, evolving over time to combat a variety of threats that later came to include not only Shia Hezbollah but also Sunni groups, particularly al-Qa’ida. The counterterrorism mission was unique back then, housed in a group at the Agency that broke down barriers. CTC analysts and field managers sat side by side, a physical partnership at Langley that was anathema in other areas. Indeed, the Agency had historically separated the two. Field operators, the men and women who recruited and ran secret agents overseas, were isolated from the analysts, the men and women who read the secret field reports, coupled them with other intelligence data such as intercepted communications and foreign media reports, and wrote intelligence articles for Washington policymakers about global events.
Although analysts and operators alike all held the same Top Secret security clearances, the highest in government, the intelligence material handled by operations specialists was deemed so sensitive—because, for example, it might identify a human source inside a foreign government—that the analysts were provided it only on a “need-to-know” basis. In the kind of arcane hierarchy that defines all bureaucracies but is understood only by those on the inside, the field operators also wielded the most firepower in the Agency.
The analysts were partners, with their own proud distinctions and history, but they couldn’t match the Agency’s operational wing for bureaucratic and budgetary heft. Guards sat at the Agency’s elevator banks, checking codes on the badges that Agency employees were required to display above the waistline. Some elevators led to the Agency’s operational divisions; others to analytic divisions. Analysts were blocked from the operational elevator banks in a byzantine, outdated organizational model that the CTC broke.
This culture of jointness was driven by one of the most powerful directors in Agency history, the legendary William J. “Bill” Casey, a New York lawyer, longtime adviser to Ronald Reagan, and one-time member of clandestine operations in World War II by the CIA’s predecessor organization. His tenure included controversial operations to aid anti-Communist guerrillas, and he also became embroiled in the biggest scandal of the Reagan presidency, the Iran-Contra scandal.† His reputation stemmed partly from his unusual presence: balding with a fringe of white hair, stooped, and known for rumpled suits, he mumbled through so many meetings that his incomprehensible comments were known throughout the building as his trademark.
Casey’s commitment to anti-Communist operations was as consistent as his drive to restructure counterterrorism. Many Agency managers initially resisted the changes he mandated in forcing operations staff and analysts together, but he never wavered. He wasn’t a classic leader—he often left subordinates guessing about his words and his intentions—but he drove change. He used his memorably obscure speaking style and his closeness to the White House, “the Casey myth,” as a key leadership advantage for an Agency that prided itself on providing intelligence and counsel to the highest levels of government. If there was somebody willing to take on challenges, including fighting a hidebound bureaucracy, it was Casey. The bureaucracy didn’t make him, he made the bureaucracy. Over time, both sides of the CIA house, the operators and the analysts, buckled under Casey’s pressure. All the kicking and screaming about feared security breaches disappeared, though not immediately.‡
CTC maintained its unique status as a combined enterprise of analysts and operators despite dramatic changes in the terror threat overseas that started during the early 1990s. In retrospect, the attacks of that decade seem like a series of unmistakable wake-up calls for the new terrorism, the shift from the Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah organization that represented terrorism from the Shia branch of Islam to more amorphous, independent Sunni groups that had little or no sponsorship from any state. Starting with the 1993 attack in New York at the World Trade Center site, the decade also then witnessed 19 dead in a truck bombing at the Khobar Towers building in Saudi Arabia; followed by the downtown Oklahoma City bombings at a federal government building in 1995, when 168 people died in a massive bomb blast. Whether it was al-Qa’ida in New York and Africa; Iran in Saudi Arabia; or antigovernment extremists in Oklahoma, no national security official could ignore the insistent drumbeat of terrorism.
The World Trade Center attack in 1993 marked a seminal moment that set the tone for CTC’s growing focus on Sunni Muslim extremists, in contrast to the Shia terrorists who had killed Buckley and other Americans in Lebanon during the 1980s. The intent of the attack presaged 9/11: the plotters intended to use a huge improvised explosive device in a rented van to buckle one of the two World Trade Center towers, potentially downing the building and collapsing the neighboring structure at the same time. The truck bomb detonated and killed six but failed to result in crippling structural damage. One of the conspirators, Ramzi Yousef, was the nephew of Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks.
Despite these turning points in the world of terrorism, the Agency didn’t assign top priority to the counterterrorism mission. That changed quickly when George Tenet was appointed director of the CIA in 1997 and prioritized counterterrorism. Implementing his priorities, though, took time and effort. One senior manager who transferred to CTC’s front office at the time says his experience reflected the second-tier status of counterterrorism then. People called him from all over the Agency, asking, “What are you doing? That’s a dying issue.”
Tenet’s focus on terrorism kept the issue not only alive but prominent. He had come into the job young; born in 1951 to a working-class Greek family in Queens, he was a busboy in the family diner before receiving degrees from Georgetown University and Columbia University. In 1982 he joined the Senate as a staff member; he became a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1985, working under influential senators who later helped vault him into the highest echelons of American intelligence. Tenet was appointed the CIA’s deputy director in 1995 and rose to become director only two years later, an almost meteoric ascent in Washington. His experience as a senior congressional staff member and his post as the National Security Council’s intelligence adviser gave him contacts and insights into intelligence coming into the job. His voracious appetite for intelligence once he joined the Agency allowed him to grasp the business in depth.
Tenet’s larger-than-life personality—boisterous, collegial, joking, profane, at times mercurial—contributed to his acceptance in the workforce. He would drink coffee at a table in the main cafeteria, chat with a junior officer, or play in the CIA basketball league with staff. He dove into work, machine-gunning questions at the same time that he learned the names of subordinates and their subordinates, and details about their lives and interests outside the office.
He could be up one day and down the next, critical of Agency analysts and operators but also their cheerleader, frustrated and remarkably supportive. Throughout the Agency, though, he was viewed by many, senior and junior officers alike, as a director who had a rare combination of talents: he had access to the Oval Office and presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that was more frequent than most directors; he respected the workforce; and he lived and breathed intelligence. Even on summer vacations, he would mark up memos in a distinctive thick blue felt-tip marker, sending back questions and demands that sometimes led CIA officials to view his vacation queries as more demanding than his incessant in-person poking and prodding.
Tenet’s drive on terrorism came as stories emerged of a shadowy extremist who was funding the growing al-Qa’ida. That hazy figure? Osama bin Ladin. The Agency had initially known of bin Ladin partly because of how he mixed in radical circles that swirled in Sudan and also because bin Ladin and his followers publicly announced their intentions toward America. Then, in 1996, the first of two bin Ladin religious documents a
ppeared, the “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” a reference to the US troops in Saudi Arabia, the home of the two holiest locations in Islam. Two years later, bin Ladin and a small group of followers calling themselves the World Islamic Front issued another religious decree, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” calling on Muslims to take responsibility for attacking Americans and their allies anywhere in the world. In other words, Al-Qa’ida was openly declaring war on the West.
CTC’s position in the Agency endured and grew not just because of al-Qa’ida’s emergence and Tenet’s drive and attention but also because the culture within the Center, and its reputation across the Agency, were maturing. In particular, leadership changes in the Center meant that its stock was rising at the Agency, especially given the support of Tenet. Spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting, and handling “assets”—a CIA term for the foreign informants on the payroll—was the bread and butter of the CIA’s overseas officers.
Late in the decade, CTC brought in a Center director who was viewed, among those crucial operations officers, as a serious player. His transfer was yet another move that could have been straight from a management textbook: transfer an organizational heavyweight to a part of the organization you want to build and that heavyweight can change perceptions.
Cofer Black, the new CTC director, was determined to help the center go on the offensive in the counterterror campaign. “Taking the fight to the enemy,” he called it.
Black was legendary in counterterrorism circles at the CIA for his long career in tough assignments and his personal involvement at the center of one of the most storied counterterrorism takedowns in history, the capture of Carlos the Jackal in Sudan in 1994.§ Black’s personality was tough, and sometimes dramatic, and his large stature matched his operational reputation. Like Tenet, he was passionately committed to the counterterrorism mission before 9/11, pressing for more action among policymakers in Washington, pushing foreign intelligence services overseas, and overshadowing his peers at the CIA’s headquarters. He and Tenet were like-minded, and Tenet often bypassed bureaucracy to work with people who shared his vision and views. For some in the chain of command, it seemed like he was cutting them out, but that was Tenet’s way.
Energetic in speech, unafraid of confronting colleagues, and aggressive in his operational approach, Black was a tailor-made counterpart for the colorful Tenet. Black set CTC on an upward path before the attacks, with Tenet always in the background supporting the CTC director as he battled for resources and carved out a profile in White House meetings. Tenet didn’t mind aggressiveness, he encouraged it. Black complied.
Setting an aggressive tone for CTC, Black used the CTC budget during the lean years of the 1990s as leverage with other, more traditional, operational components in the Agency. One of CTC’s challenges had been the fact that it did not control any CIA offices overseas, so its senior managers could not offer up-and-coming operations officers management jobs overseas. Those plum assignments were controlled by the traditional divisions that had responsibility for Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America—all the world’s major geographic regions. Black changed that. He used the money CTC received to fund and help manage several international offices, an unheard-of coup for an Agency entity that had been seen as a minor-league player.
He also changed CTC’s recruitment of a new generation of operations officers. In what was a CIA ritual that seemed more like a fraternity pledging experience than a bureaucratic exercise, the Agency’s operations managers regularly traveled to the CIA’s main training facility, a sprawling expanse of land called “the Farm,” to mix with the new trainees and determine which of them to try to recruit into individual divisions. CTC didn’t have a seat at this draft table for new talent. Black changed that, though, pushing to participate in the direct recruitment of the new graduates. He added relevance—“gravitas,” as one officer put it—to a Center that had been an Agency stepchild since its inception in 1986. As this officer who worked for Black described it, “Cofer gave CTC an operational centering. He made it a player.” He describes the shifting attitudes: “If you want a cool ops [operational] job, come to CTC.”
Al-Qa’ida’s relentless march matched CTC’s emergence. The terror events through the late 1990s showed that bin Ladin’s stewing rage, expressed in ideological statements, would not be empty words. The 1998 attacks against American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania left more than two hundred dead, by far the biggest loss of life since Hezbollah had burst on the scene. Meanwhile, an almost-forgotten event in America kept the CTC team working and solidified its status within the Agency during these years and into the new century. It was the long search for Mir Aimal Kansi, who murdered two CIA employees and wounded three others in a shooting outside a CIA entrance in January 1993. Kansi had purchased an automatic weapon and stopped his car at a stoplight directly outside CIA headquarters. Stepping outside his car, he calmly murdered two CIA staff and injured three others. Kansi fled overseas immediately after the killings, and it took local investigators days to center on him as the primary suspect. He returned home to his native Pakistan.
Quickly, Kansi became the subject of a massive manhunt that was to last four years, paralleling that 1990s’ era of the early emergence of al-Qa’ida. CTC assembled a group to work with the FBI to find intelligence about Kansi’s whereabouts, but the project was defined by fits and starts. False leads, operations that never bore fruit, and endless dead ends in Pakistan meant that the trail occasionally went cold, even as it proved exhaustive and extensive. Says one CTC manager who was involved in overseeing the operation, “We never stopped probing, including would-be snatch operations when we thought we had him located.”
None of this panned out until 1997. “The final operation had nothing to do with anything that preceded it,” the manager remembers. “The [informant] shows up in Karachi, says I can get him [Kansi].” The informant carried a photograph of Kansi, who was using an alias; the photo appeared to be a match. The combination of Kansi’s murder of CIA officers and the CIA’s partnership with the FBI in the hunt for him meant that he remained a top-tier priority for the Agency while he was on the run. Kansi, captured in a swiftly developing operation, soon came back to America on a US government aircraft, to be tried and then executed.
The Kansi case, beginning the same year as the fateful first attack on the World Trade Center, galvanized the Agency. Catching him was a “big deal for us,” remembers a senior CTC manager. The case was a stunning operational coup.
The FBI was key to the Kansi hunt particularly because of the law-enforcement focus of US counterterrorism operations then and the interest in bringing Kansi back to a US court for trial. The CIA typically collects information for intelligence purposes, to help inform and guide US policymakers, but that information is not collected and processed in a manner that is designed for US courts. CIA intelligence is not evidence. The FBI does, however, collect evidence, ensuring that a chain of custody is defensible in court, for example, and that evidentiary standards can withstand questioning by a defense lawyer who can probe every bit of the prosecution's case in an open hearing. Further, FBI agents, in addition to their expertise in evidence collection, are far more likely to appear in court as witnesses in public trials than CIA officers. To bring Kansi to trial, and to collect the evidence needed to convict him, FBI partnership in the hunt was critical.
For years, FBI agents worked the case, both from FBI offices in Washington and also through FBI representatives who were on long-term assignments to the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA. Those agents sat in on CTC meetings to trade information and ensure that FBI agents at Bureau headquarters and field offices had a pipeline into the CIA. FBI partnership wasn’t perfect, by any means, across the CIA, but the ties were strong on the Kansi case. There would be no prospect of an endgame—justice meted out in a US federal court—without FBI agents working side-by-side with the Agency, so it wasn’t just a partnership built on some polite sense of goodwill, it was a link cemented by need.