9-11 Commission 24.03.2004, New World Order - 9-11

Day Two Transcript: 9/11 Commission Hearing

Wednesday, March 24, 2004; 7:00 PM

Following is the full transcript of Wednesday’s hearing by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:

Speakers: Thomas H. Kean, Commission Chairman

Lee H. Hamilton, Commission Vice Chair

Richard Ben-Veniste, Commission Member

Max Cleland, Commission Member

Fred F. Fielding, Commission Member

Jamie S. Gorelick, Commission Member

Slade Gorton, Commission Member

John F. Lehman, Commission Member

Timothy J. Roemer, Commission Member

James R. Thompson, Commission Member

Bob Kerrey, Commission Member

Philip Zelikow, Commission Executive Director

Christopher Kojm, Commission Deputy Executive Director

Witnesses: George Tenet, Director, Central Intelligence Agency

James Pavitt, Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency

Samuel Berger, Former National Security Adviser

Richard Clarke, Former National Coordinator For Counterterrorism For National Security Council

Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary Of State

KEAN: I’d like to call today’s hearing to order.

Yesterday, we looked at the diplomatic and military aspects of national counterterrorism policy leading to September 11th, 2001. We heard from the current and former secretaries of state and defense.

Today we’ll hear about intelligence policy and national policy coordination.

Our first panel will investigate the CIA’s efforts to disrupt Al Qaida operations and bin Laden in the Afghanistan sanctuary. Shedding light on all this will be Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.

Before we hear from him, we’ll begin as we did yesterday with a staff statement.

These statements are informed by the work of the commissioners, as well as the staff, and represent the staff’s best effort to reconstruct the factual record. Judgments and recommendations are for commissioners and the commission to make, which we will do during the course of our work and, most importantly, in our final report.

Delivering in the statement on the role of intelligence policy and national counterterrorism policy will be our executive director, Dr. Philip Zelikow, and our deputy executive director, Chris Kojm.

ZELIKOW: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Members of the commission, with your help your staff has developed initial findings to present to the public on the use of our intelligence agencies in countering terrorism. These findings may help frame some of the issues for these hearings and inform the development of your judgments and recommendations.

Today, we will focus on the role of the Central Intelligence Agency as an instrument of national policy. The issues—I want to emphasize this—the issues related to the collection of intelligence, analysis and warning and the management of the intelligence community will be taken up at the commission’s hearing next month. By the way, at which we expect to hear from DCI Tenet again.

This report reflects the results of our work so far. We remain ready to revise our understanding of events as our investigation progresses.

The staff statement reflects the collective effort of a number of members of our staff. Alexis Albion, Michael Hurley, Dan Marcus, Lloyd Salvetti and Steve Dunne did much of the investigative work reflected in the statement.

For this area of our work, we were fortunate in being able to build upon a great deal of excellent work already done by the congressional joint inquiry.

ZELIKOW: The Central Intelligence Agency has cooperated fully in making available both the documents and interviews that we have needed so far on this topic.

I’d now like to turn to our deputy executive director, and former deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence, Christopher Kojm.

KOJM: Thank you.

The CIA plays a dual role in counterterrorism. Like other members of the intelligence community, the CIA is an intelligence producer. It collects and analyzes foreign intelligence and provides this information to policy-makers.

When directed by the president, the CIA is also responsible for executing policy through the conduct of covert action.

The director of central intelligence, from whom you will hear this morning, also has dual responsibilities. He is the president’s senior intelligence adviser. He is also the head of an agency, the CIA, that executes policy.

In speaking with the commission, DCI Tenet was blunt: Quote, “I am not a policy-maker,” end of quote.

He presents intelligence and offers up operational judgments, but he says it is ultimately up to policy-makers to decide how best to use that intelligence. Quote, “It is there job to figure out where I fit into their puzzle,” end of quote, Tenet said.

Both the DCI and the deputy director for operations, James Pavitt, invoked lessons learned from the Iran-Contra scandal: The CIA should stay well behind the line separating policy-maker from policy- implementer.

“The CIA does not initiate operations unless it is to support a policy directive,” said Tenet.

For Pavitt, the lesson of Iran-Contra was, quote, “We don’t do policy from out here, and you don’t want us to,” end of quote.

Yet, as a member of the National Security Council, the DCI is one of a handful of senior officials who advises the president on national security. The DCI’s operational judgments can and did influence key decisions on the U.S. government’s policy toward Al Qaida.

In the case of Al Qaida, the line between policy-maker and policy-implementer is hard to discern.

Renditions: Under the presidential directives in the Clinton administration, Presidential Decision Directive 39 and PDD 62, the CIA had two main operational responsibilities for combating terrorism: rendition and disruption.

We will first discuss the CIA’s work with renditions. In other words, if a terrorist suspect is outside of the United States, the CIA helps to catch and send him to the United States or a third country.

Overseas officials of CIA, the FBI and the State Department may locate the terrorist suspect, perhaps using their own sources. If possible, they seek help from a foreign government. Though the FBI is often part of the process, the CIA is usually the main player, building and defining the relationships with the foreign government intelligence agencies and internal security services.

The CIA often plays an active role, sometimes calling upon the support of other agencies for logistical or transportation assistance.

Director Tenet has publicly testified that 70 terrorists were rendered and brought to justice before 9/11. These activities could only achieve so much. In countries where the CIA did not have cooperative relationships with local security services, the rendition strategy often failed.

In at least two such cases, when the CIA decided to seek the assistance of the host country, the target may have been tipped off and escaped.

In the case of bin Laden, the United States had no diplomatic or intelligence officers living and working in Afghanistan, nor was the Taliban regime inclined to cooperate. CIA would have to look for other ways to bring bin Laden to justice.

KOJM: Disruptions: Under the relevant directive of the Clinton administration, foreign terrorists who posed a credible threat to the United States were subject to, quote, “preemption and disruption,” end of quote, abroad, consistent with U.S. laws. The CIA had the lead.

Where terrorists could not be brought to justice in the United States or a third country, the CIA could try to disrupt their operations, attacking the cells of Al Qaida operatives or affiliated groups.

The CIA encouraged foreign intelligence services to make creative use of laws already in place to investigate, detain and otherwise harass known or suspected terrorists.

Disruptions of suspected terror cells thwarted numerous plots against American interests abroad, particularly during high-threat periods. After the embassy bombings of 1998, the U.S. disrupted planned attacks against at least one American embassy in Albania. In late 1999, preceding the millennium celebrations, the activities of 21 individuals were disrupted in eight countries.

In two subsequent phases of intensive threat reporting, the Ramadan period in late 2000 and the summer prior to 9/11, the CIA again went into what the DCI described as millennium threat mode, engaging with foreign liaison and disrupting operations around the world.

At least one planned terrorist attack in Europe may have been successfully disrupted during the summer of 2001.

Renditions and disruptions continued as an important component of U.S. counterterrorism policy throughout the period leading up to 9/11. They are still widely used today.

Using covert action in Afghanistan: To disrupt bin Laden himself or his base in Afghanistan, a very different strategy of disruption would have to be developed.

In 1996, as an organizational experiment undertaken with seed money, the counterterrorism center at the CIA created a special issues station devoted exclusively to bin Laden. Bin Laden was then still in Sudan and was considered by the CIA to be a terrorist financier. The original name of the station was TFL, standing for terrorist financial links. The bin Laden station was not a response to new intelligence, but reflected interest in and concern about bin Laden’s connections.

The CIA believed that bin Laden’s move to Afghanistan in May 1996 might be a fortunate development. The CIA knew the ground in Afghanistan, as its officers had worked with indigenous tribal forces during the war against the Soviet Union.

The CIA definitely had a lucky break when a former associate of bin Laden walked into a U.S. embassy abroad and provided an abundance of information about the organization. These revelations were corroborated by other intelligence.

By early 1997, the OBL station knew that bin Laden was not just a financier, but an organizer of terrorist activity. It knew that Al Qaida had a military committee planning operations against U.S. interests worldwide and was actively trying to obtain nuclear material.

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. Employees in the unit told us they felt their zeal attracted ridicule from their peers.

In 1997, CIA headquarters authorized U.S. officials to begin developing a network of agents to gather intelligence inside Afghanistan about bin Laden and his organization, and prepare a plan to capture him.

By 1998, DCI Tenet was giving considerable personal attention to the bin Laden threat.

Since its inception, the OBL station had been working on a covert action plan to capture bin Laden and bring him to justice. The plan had been elaborately developed by the spring of 1998. Its final variant in this period used Afghan tribal fighters recruited by the CIA to assault a terrorist compound where bin Laden might be found, capture him if possible, and take him to a location where he could be picked up and transported to the United States.

Though the plan had dedicated proponents in the bin Laden unit and was discussed for months among top policy-makers, all of the CIA’s leadership and a key official in the field agreed that the odds of failure were too high. They did not recommend it for approval by the White House.

After the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed successive authorizations for the CIA to undertake offensive operations in Afghanistan against bin Laden.

KOJM: Each new document responded to an opportunity to use local forces from various countries against bin Laden himself and later his principal lieutenants. These were authorizations for the conduct of operations in which people on both sides could be killed. Policy- makers devoted careful attention to crafting these sensitive and closely held documents.

In accordance with these authorities the CIA developed successive covert action programs using particular indigenous groups or proxies who might be able to operate in different parts of Afghanistan. These proxies would also try to provide intelligence on bin Laden and his organization with an eye to finding bin Laden and then ambushing him if the opportunity arose.

The CIA’s Afghanistan assets reported on about a half a dozen occasions before 9/11 that they had considered attacking bin Laden usually as he traveled in his convoy along the rough Afghan roads. Each time the operation was reportedly aborted. Several times the Afghans said that bin Laden had taken a different route than expected. On one occasion security was said to be too tight to capture him; another time they heard women and children’s voices from inside the convoy and abandoned the assault for fear of killing innocents in accordance with CIA guidelines.

The plan: As time passed, morale in the bin Laden unit sagged. The former deputy chief told the joint inquiry that they felt like they were buying time trying to stop bin Laden and disrupting Al Qaida members until military force could be used. In June 1999 National Security Adviser Berger reported to President Clinton that covert action efforts against bin Laden had not been fruitful.

In the summer of 1999 new leaders arrived at the counterterrorism center and the bin Laden unit. The new director of that center was Cofer Black. He and his aides worked on a new operational strategy for going after Al Qaida. The focus was on getting better intelligence. They proposed a shift from reliance on the Afghan proxies alone to an effort to create the CIA’s own sources.

KOJM: They called the new strategy simply, “The Plan.”

The plan also proposed increasing contacts between the CIA and the Northern Alliance rebels fighting the Taliban.

The Predator: The plan resulted in increased reporting on Al Qaida. Still, going into the year 2000, the CIA had never laid American eyes on bin Laden in Afghanistan.

President Clinton prodded his advisers to do better. National Security Council Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke helped Assistant DCI for Collection Charles Allen and Vice Admiral Scott Fry of the joint staff work together on the military’s ongoing efforts to develop new collection capabilities inside Afghanistan.

With the NSC staff’s backing, the counterterrorism center and the military came up with a proposal to fly an unmanned drone, called the Predator, over Afghanistan to survey the territory below and relay video footage.

That information, the White House hoped, could either boost U.S. knowledge of Al Qaida or be used to kill bin Laden with a cruise missile.

Assistant DCI Allen said that the CIA’s senior management was originally reluctant to go ahead with the Predator program, adding that, quote, “It was a bloody struggle,” end of quote. But the NSC staff was firm and the CIA agreed to fly the Predator as a trial concept.

Drones were flown successfully over Afghanistan 16 times in fall 2000. At least twice, the Predator saw a security detail around a tall man in a white robe whom some analysts determined was probably bin Laden. The Predator was spotted by Taliban forces. They were unable to intercept it, but the Afghan press service publicized the discovery of a strange aircraft that it speculated might be looking for bin Laden.

When winter weather prevented the Predator from flying during the remainder of 2000, the counterterrorism center looked forward to resuming flights in 2001.

The USS Cole: When the American destroyer the USS Cole was bombed in Yemen in October 2000, Al Qaida was immediately suspected of having struck again.

The counterterrorism center developed an offensive initiative for Afghanistan regardless of policy or financial constraints. It was called the Blue Sky memo.

In December 2000, the CIA sent this to the NSC staff. The memo recommended increased support to anti-Taliban groups and to proxies who might ambush bin Laden. The counterterrorism center also proposed a major effort to back Northern Alliance forces in order to stave off the Taliban army and tie down Al Qaida fighters, thereby hindering terrorist activities elsewhere.

No action was taken on these ideas in the few remaining weeks of the Clinton administration.

KOJM: The Blue Sky memo itself was not apparently discussed with the incoming top Bush administration officials during the transition. The counterterrorism center began pressing these proposals after the new team took office.

The Bush administration: The CIA briefed President-elect George W. Bush and the incoming national security officials on covert action programs in Afghanistan. Deputy DCI McLaughlin said that he walked through the elements of the Al Qaida problem with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, including an explanation of the special authority signed by President Clinton.

DCI Tenet and Deputy Director for Operations Pavitt gave an intelligence briefing to President-elect Bush, Vice President-elect Cheney and Dr. Rice, which included the topic of Al Qaida. Pavitt recalled conveying that bin Laden was one of the gravest threats to the country. President-elect Bush asked whether killing bin Laden would end the problem. Pavitt said he and the DCI answered that killing bin Laden would have an impact but not stop the threat.

The CIA later provided more formal assessments to the White House reiterating that conclusion. It added that the only long-term way to deal with the threat was to end Al Qaida’s ability to use Afghanistan as a sanctuary for its operations arming the Predator.

During the fall of 2000 Clarke and other counterterrorism officials learned of a promising and energetic Air Force effort that was already trying to arm the Predator with missiles. Clarke and Assistant DCI Allen urged flying the reconnaissance version of the Predator in the spring as soon as the weather improved and using the armed Predator against bin Laden as soon as possible.

DCI Tenet, supported by military officers and the joint staff, balked at this plan. They did not want to go ahead with reconnaissance flights alone and argued for waiting until the armed version was ready before flying Predator again.

Given the experience in the fall of 2000 they worried that flying the reconnaissance version would forfeit the element of surprise for the armed Predator. They also feared one of these scarce aircraft might be shot down since Taliban radar had previously tracked it, forcing it into a more vulnerable flight path. They also contended that there were not enough Predators to be able to conduct reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan and still have aircraft leftover for the testing then under way in the United States to develop the armed version.

Clarke believed that these arguments were stalling tactics by CIA’s risk-adverse directorate of operations. He wanted the reconnaissance flights to begin on their own, both for collection and to allow for possible strikes with other military forces.

KOJM: He thought the reconnaissance flights could be conducted with fewer aircraft than had been used in 2000 so that testing on the armed version might continue.

DCI Tenet’s position prevailed: The reconnaissance flights were deferred while work continued on the armed version.

The armed Predator was being readied at an accelerated pace during 2001. The Air Force officials who managed the program told us that the policy arguments, including quarrels about who would pay for the aircraft, had no effect on their timetable for operations. The timetable was instead driven by a variety of technical issues.

A program that ordinarily would have taken years was, they said, finished in months. They were, quote, “throwing out the books on the normal acquisition process just to press on and get it done,” end of quote.

In July, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley ordered that the armed Predator be ready by September 1st. CIA officials supported these accelerated efforts. The Air Force program manager told us that they were still resolving technical issues as of 9/11 and, quote, “We just took what we had and deployed it,” end of quote.

Meanwhile, policy-makers were arguing about the unprecedented step of creating a missile system for use by an agency outside of the Department of Defense. DCI Tenet was concerned.

At a meeting of NSC principals on September 4th, National Security Adviser Rice summarized the consensus that the armed Predator was not ready, but that the capability was needed. The group left open issues related to command and control.

In the meantime, the principals committee agreed the CIA should consider going ahead with flying reconnaissance missions with the Predator. Shortly after the meeting, DCI Tenet agreed to proceed with such flights.

Developing a new strategy: The new administration’s policy review apparently began in March and continued throughout the spring and summer of 2001.

At the end of May, National Security Adviser Rice met with DCI Tenet and their counterterrorism experts. She asked about, quote, “taking the offensive,” end of quote, against Al Qaida and asked Clarke and the counterterrorism center chief, Cofer Black, to develop a full range of options.

A plan for a larger covert action effort was a major component of the new Al Qaida strategy, codified in a draft presidential directive that was first circulated in early June.

The emerging covert action plan built upon the ideas the CIA and Clarke had been working on since December 2000. A notable change was that Rice and Hadley wanted to place less emphasis on the Northern Alliance and more on anti-Taliban Pashtuns. Clarke was impatient to get at least some money to the Northern Alliance right away in order to keep them in the fight.

KOJM: Meanwhile, the intelligence community began to receive its greatest volume of threat reporting since the millennium plot. By late July, there were indications of multiple, possibly catastrophic, terrorist attacks being planned against American interests overseas. The counterterrorism center identified 30 possible overseas targets and launched disruption operations around the world.

Some CIA officials expressed frustration about the pace of policy-making during the stressful summer of 2001. Although Tenet said he thought the policy machinery was working in what he called a rather orderly fashion, Deputy DCI McLaughlin told us he felt a great tension, especially in June and July 2001, between the new administration’s need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency.

Officials including McLaughlin were also frustrated when some policy-makers who had not lived through such threat surges before questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation, although they were persuaded once they probed it.

Two veteran counterterrorism center officers who were deeply involved in bin Laden issues were so worried about an impending disaster that one of them told us that they considered resigning and going public with their concerns. DCI Tenet, who was briefing the president and his top advisers daily, told us that his sense was that officials at the White House had grasped the sense of urgency he was communicating to them.

By early August, DCI Tenet said that intelligence suggested that whatever terrorist activity might have been originally planned had been delayed. At the same time, the deputies committee reached a consensus on a new Afghan policy, paving the way for Northern Alliance aid. NSC principles apparently endorsed the new presidential directive on Al Qaida at their meeting on September 4th.

On September 10th, Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley formally tasked DCI Tenet to draw up new draft authorities for the broad covert action program envisioned in that directive, including significant additional funding and involving Pashtun elements as well as the Northern Alliance.

Events would, of course, overtake this task. Within days of the September 11th attacks, a new counterterrorism policy was in place.

KOJM: Key Issue Areas: The story of CIA activities before 9/11 brings up a number of key issues for considering how policy-makers made use of covert capabilities for attacking bin Laden.

Many CIA officers, including Deputy Director for Operations Pavitt, have criticized policy-makers for not giving the CIA authorities to conduct effective operations against bin Laden. This issue manifests itself in a debate about the scope of the covert actions in Afghanistan authorized by President Clinton. NSC staff and CIA officials differ starkly here.

Senior NSC staff members told us they believe the president’s intent was clear: He wanted bin Laden dead. On successive occasions, President Clinton issued authorities instructing the CIA to use its proxies to capture or assault bin Laden and his lieutenants in operations in which they might be killed. The instructions, except in one defined contingency, were to capture bin Laden, if possible.

Senior legal advisers in the Clinton administration agreed that under the law of armed conflict, killing a person who posed an imminent threat to the United States was an act of self-defense, not an assassination.

As former National Security Adviser Berger explained, “If we wanted to kill bin Laden with cruise missiles, why would we not want to kill him with covert action?” Clarke’s recollection is the same.

But if the policy-makers believed their intent was clear, every CIA official interviewed on this topic by the commission, from DCI Tenet to the official who actually briefed the agents in the field, told us ...

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9-11 Commission 24.03.2004, New World Order - 9-11

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