CIA transnational anti-terrorism activities
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This article deals with activities of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) related to terrorism. Especially after the CIA lost its coordinating role over the entire Intelligence Community (IC), it is impossible to understand US counterterrorism by looking at the CIA alone. Coordinating structures have been created by each president to fit his administrative style and the perceived level of threat.
The US has a different counterterrorist structure than other close allies, such as Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Each has a structure that fits its particular legal system and culture; there is no ideal solution. A continuing issue is whether there needs to be a domestic intelligence service separate from the FBI, which has had difficulty in breaking away from its law enforcement roots and cooperating with other intelligence services.
The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is no longer in the CIA proper, but is in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). NCTC, however, contains personnel from the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) of the Department of Justice
, and other members of the IC. A counterterrorism center did exist in the CIA before the NCTC was established.
Given the restrictions of the National Security Act of 1947
, which created the CIA but strictly forbade it from having any domestic police authority, the role of the CIA still has multiple dimensions. The National Clandestine Service (NCS) of the CIA can infiltrate or otherwise gain human intelligence (HUMINT
) from terrorist organizations, their supporters, or from friendly foreign intelligence services (FIS). The NCS has a covert operations capability that, possibly in combination with military units from the United States Special Operations Command
(USSOCOM), may take direct action
against terrorist groups outside the United States.
Above all, the key CIA counterterror partner is the FBI, which has the domestic operational responsibility for counterterrorism, both domestic intelligence collection and domestic police work. In the highly decentralized police system of the United States, the FBI also provides liaison and operates cooperatively with state and local police agencies, as well as with relevant Federal units. For example, the United States Coast Guard
has an important role in preventing terrorist infiltration by sea. Military units have a specialized Counterintelligence Force Protection Source Operations capability to protect their personnel and operations.
Contrary to popular belief, the US intelligence community was dealing with aspects of terrorism long before the September 11, 2001 attacks
. Those aspects included the support of guerillas against the Soviets, in Southeast Asia, and other places where the guerrillas' methods may have included terror. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the US worked with government to suppress terror. While government research suggests personality traits that may be common to a substantial number of terrorists, terror has few other constants. It certainly is not restricted to Muslims. It has taken place on every continent except Antarctica.
In all these cases, intelligence support clearly was necessary. In some of them, clandestine intelligence collection and covert action, by CIA personnel or those they sponsored, dealt with both sides of the terrorist and counterterrorist roles.
Many studies of the analysis of, and countermeasures to, terrorism remain classified. Unclassified CIA documents on terrorism go back at least into the late 1970s. At that time, Western Europe often had opposing terrorist groups in the same conflict, such as nationalists and separatists in Northern Ireland, Spanish nationalists and Basque separatists, Turkey, Transnational terrorism was still unusual, with the report noting that the Basque ETA group was active in France as well as Spain.
There are relevant observations from government reports by researchers who have various levels of access into the IC, including the Federal Research Division
(FRD) and Congressional Research Service
of the Library of Congress
. A 1999 FRD study examined some changes from terrorists of the past, especially the emergence of terrorist acts carried out by individuals and members of small, ad hoc groups largely unknown to security organizations. Tactics, as well as sources, had changed, with the greater use of suicide attacks and attacks by women and children.
A very significant concern was the possible use, by terrorists, of weapons of mass destruction
(WMD).
Researchers for a 1999 General Accounting Office study had classified access.
in such groups. The combination of familiarity and compartmentalization make it extremely difficult to introduce human agents to the groups; it is more likely that human intelligence can be gained by subverting someone who is already a member, or perhaps is indirectly associated (e.g., a banker or arms dealer).
Efforts to use HUMINT
operations with non-official cover
, especially in the areas outside the groups' staging areas, have been disappointing. Stepped-up efforts to use non-official cover
, especially in Europe, began by creating covers in investment banks and consulting firms. Only several years later was it realized that terrorists would have little to do with such organizations. Another realization is even with excellent cover, the HUMINT successes would be unlikely to recruit people deep inside the terrorist cells.
Where HUMINT had more potential, and where the cover organizations needed to change to help find appropriate targets, was on the fringes of the terrorist organizations, either groups from which the group would need goods or services, or from people with awareness of the groups but not supporting them. Even if a group such as al-Qaeda had its own ships, there are reports that 15 cargo ships are linked to al-Qaeda. the activities of those ships, at ports, might draw the attention of security officials, or even low-level dockworkers or craftsmen. .
Another potential target could be moderate Muslims that do not want to take up an overt role against jihadists, but could supply information. The cover for approaching such persons could be any of a wide range of businesses and institutions.
Foreign specialists in explosives, WMD, and other warfare methods might come to CIA notice in their countries of origin. By tracking their movements, the specialists-for-hire might lead to trusted persons within the groups. Once a member is identified, other intelligence collection methods could be directed at his communications, surveillance of his home and place of work, etc.
There has been significant controversy, without there being classified Congressional views, of black sites for interrogating suspects, as well as the Guantanamo base. A separate role is played by regional Counterterrorist Intelligence Center
s.
The actual interception of messages probably is not done by the CIA, but by NSA or possibly Service Cryptologic Elements (SCE): tactical SIGINT detachments attached to military tactical units. Important communications intercepts have been achieved, with the results clearly available to CIA. There are cases, however, where a joint CIA-NSA organization places clandestine intercept equipment. The National Security Archive commented, "In 1987, Deputy Director for Science and Technology Evan Hineman established... a new Office for Special Projects. concerned not with satellites, but with emplaced sensors – sensors that could be placed in a fixed location to collect signals intelligence or measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) about a specific target. Such sensors had been used to monitor Chinese missile tests, Soviet laser activity, military movements, and foreign nuclear programs. The office was established to bring together scientists from the DS&T’s Office of SIGINT Operations, who designed such systems, with operators from the Directorate of Operations, who were responsible for transporting the devices to their clandestine locations and installing them.
While communications intercepts are usually highly classified, they have come up in US Congressional testimony on terrorism. For example, an FBI official testified with regard to the 1998 United States embassy bombings
Kenya, and Tanzania, which took place so closely in time that the terrorist teams can reasonably be assumed to have coordinated their operations in near real-time.
They have also been revealed in legal proceedings against terrorists, such as United States vs. Osama bin Laden et al., indictment, Nov. 4, 1998, and updates.
), often from satellites, used against nation-states is of limited use in tracking the movement of groups of small size and little physical infrastructure. More success has come from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which are hard to see and hear, to do such things as follow cars, or loiter above a building, photographic traffic in and out, often with low-light or infrared sensors that work in apparent darkness.
The CIA experimented with a small remote-controlled reconnaissance aircraft, the MQ-1 Predator, to try to spot Bin Laden in Afghanistan
. A series of flights in autumn 2000, overseen by CTC officials and flown by USAF drone pilots from a control room at the CIA's Langley headquarters, produced probable sightings of the Qaeda leader.
– "following the money" – often can trace the organization behind a particular attack. Once that organization is identified, value transfers from it can point to other operational cells. The United States Department of the Treasury
's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has the power to "freeze" the accounts of organizations suspected of funding terrorist activities.
Terrorist groups use three types of financing, which are increasingly difficult to track by U.S. intelligence including CIA:
According to the Center for Defense Information
, intelligence agencies help OFAC build its "freeze list" by sending it lists of individuals and organizations believed to be associated with terror. Not all such suspects go onto the freeze list, since the intelligence community can use financial transactions as a means of tracking them.
One of the challenges of anti-terrorist FININT is that surveillance of transactions only works when the value transfers go through conventional, regulated banks and other financial institutions. Many cultures use informal value transfer system
s, such as the hawala
widely used in the Middle East and Asia, where value is transferred through a network of brokers, who operate with funds often not in banks, with the value transfer orders through personal communications among brokers. The brokers know one another and operate on a paperless honor system.
A study from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis [India] describes "narco-terrorism" as "the nexus between narcotics and terrorism...It is recognised as one of the oldest and most dependable sources of terrorist financing
, primarily because of the magnitudes of finance involved in both the activities." The study indicates that informal value transfer systems, known "... [in] India it is known as hawala, in Pakistan as hundi, in China fei qian (flying money), in Philippines as black market peso exchange" are important means of transferring funds to terrorist organizations.
Some hawala brokers have placed some of their reserve funds in banks, where they have been frozen by OFAC. On Nov. 7, 2001, the Treasury Department made raids and freezes to shut down two hawala networks, Al Barakaat and Al Taqwa, both believed to be funneling millions of dollars from the United States to abroad to support terrorist activities. In addition to the placement of 62 people and groups associated with the two organizations on the asset freeze list, FBI and U.S. Customs agents raided the two networks' offices in six U.S cities.
According to CDI,
Hawala plays an important role in the Afghan drug economy, and in drug trade worldwide.
CIA's Directorate of Intelligence produces analytic products that can help identify terrorist groups, their structure, and plans. These may benefit from signals intelligence from the National Security Agency
(NSA), from imagery intelligence from the National Reconnaissance Office
(NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA), from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
(FinCEN) of the Department of the Treasury
, and from other specialized agencies.
While the Congressional Research Service
technically is prohibited from making its reports automatically available to the public, several legislative efforts are underway to change this, and, in practice, its reports are often Internet-accessible within a few days of issue, typically on the Federation of American Scientists
website.
, did not work well, there has been an Intelligence Community effort to avoid the problems of stovepiping
, especially where it involves lack of communication between analysts and operators. There is a continuing controversy on how to be sure Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) information gets to the analysts; the FBI culture has been extremely decentralized, so "dots to be connected" in two field offices were not shared, although they might have been a warning of the September 11, 2001 attacks
.
The overall problems of stovepiping and encouraging cross-functional teams, in the context of terrorism, has been addressed, among other groups, by the House Intelligence Committee. One of their chief recommendations was:
Their recommendations for the CIA included:
Under Porter Goss, for a variety of reasons including innovation, CIA has proposed moving its National Resources Division concerned with issues in the US, to Denver, letting it work more freely than under Headquarters bureaucracy. Some officers believe this is a bad idea and would hurt information sharing, the critical problem with the FBI. With due regard to the prohibition on the CIA having any domestic law enforcement powers,
s. The CIA (and predecessors) has a long history of placing selected collection and analytic functions (e.g., Foreign Broadcast Information Service
intercept locations) in places where they can coordinate with regional intelligence agencies, and also have access to people with native-level understanding of languages and culture.
an Tupamaros
terrorist group kidnapped and killed United States Agency for International Development
Police adviser Dan Mitrione; his body was found on August 10.
bombings, starting on "Bloody Friday" (July 21), took place in Northern Ireland.
The best known terrorist in 1972 was the kidnapping and killing of Israeli Olympic team members, in the Munich massacre
by the Palestinian group, Black September
. West German response was ad hoc and poorly executed, resulting in the deaths of all hostages, several terrorists, and a German police officer. This incident focused world attention on the need for early warning, hostage rescue, and, with great controversy, preemptive and retaliatory attacks on terrorists.
attacked the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. The terrorists killed the US ambassador, Cleo Noel and other diplomats.
In Guadalajara
, Mexico, the People's Revolutionary Armed Forces killed the US consul general.
, Uganda
pointed to the need for international antiterrorist cooperation, and also demonstrated the ability to rescue hostages at long range (i.e., the Israeli Operation Entebbe
). This became a prototype for other hostage rescue forces.
Terrorism in the US was not necessarily directed at US organizations. Exiled Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Subsequent investigations suggest the bombers may have had CIA ties in Chile.
"... in February 1976, President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order (EO) 11905 which forbade all U.S. government employees from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassination" (Section 5(g)). Ford's EO was superseded by President Jimmy Carter's EO 12036, which tightened restrictions on intelligence agencies. The ban on assassinations was continued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, (EO 12333, Sec 2.11) and extended to apply specifically to intelligence agencies. This ban remains in effect today, although challenges have been mounted in each of the last two years by Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga.
Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades later killed. This brought additional NATO attention to the problem.
In November, there was Muslim-on-Muslim violence with the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. French security forces assisted the Saudis in recapturing the building, indicating that ad hoc alliances would form for both terrorism and counterterrorism.
suicide attack
s were terrifying for the sailors against which they were directed, but the attacks were exclusively directed at military targets, by the regular military of a nation-state.
Attacks by non-national actors, such as the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing
of US and French troops under UN auspices, are more problematic. The Beirut attacks are usually called "terrorism" in news reports, but, if terrorism is assumed to be against noncombatants, they may not qualify. The organizers and attackers might well be categorized as illegal combatants under the Geneva Convention, but the Conventions do not define terrorism.
During this decade, the US supported Muslim fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan
. The training and arms supplied may have helped start transnational jihadist groups.
signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 30 dealing with responses to armed attacks on U.S. citizens or assets. The NSDD created a coordinating body, the Interdepartmental Group on Terrorism, to develop and assign to various executive agencies specific responsibilities when terrorist incidents occurred. The objective was to have in place, before an incident occurred, guidelines for such matters as lines of authority, intelligence responsibilities, and response training. A Special Situation Group (SSG) was established to advise the president, and lead agencies to coordinate responses were named.
Supporting the SSG was a Terrorist Incident Working Group with representatives from the Departments of State and Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, the FBI, FEMA, and the National Security Staff. It was to give "direct operational support…and to provide advice and recommendations during an incident" to the SSG.
Further complicating the designation is that there is no consensus on who sponsored the attacks. A US court did find Iran responsible, which would make it an attack by a nation-state on military personnel of two other nation-states. In 2001, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger
stated: "But we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn't then."
Rules of engagement
for the Marines were restrictive; they could not set up what would be considered today a safe perimeter against truck bombs. They carried rifles that had to be loaded before use; there were no heavier weapons that could deflect a truck or destroy its engine.
The Commission termed this a terrorist attack, and raised questions about the intelligence support available to it (emphasis added):
("The Base") grew out of Arab volunteers who fought the Soviets and their puppet regimes in Afghanistan
in the 1980s. In 1984 Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden
set up an organization known as the Office of Services in Peshawar
, Pakistan, to coordinate and finance the "Afghan Arabs
", as the volunteers became known.
Azzam and Bin Laden set up recruitment offices in the US, under the name "Al-Khifah
", the hub of which was the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn
's Atlantic Avenue. This was "a place of pivotal importance for Operation Cyclone
".
. It denied dealing with non-Afghan fighters, or having direct contact with bin Laden. However, various authorities relate that the Agency brought both Afghans and Arabs to the United States for military training.
". "Blowback" is a CIA term of art referring to operations, launched against an enemy, which eventually hurt their originators. Various programs, either directly supported by, or known to, US intelligence, were encouraged, in the 1980s, to train combatants for Afghanistan.
Some of this training and preparation took place in the United States. In the case at hand, blowback into the United States may have come from a pipeline, from Brooklyn, New York, to Peshawar
, Pakistan
, the gateway to joining the Afghan mujahedin. The Brooklyn end was at the Al Kifah Refugee Center
, funded under the CIA's Operation Cyclone
, and the associated Afghan Refugee Service. The Maktab al-Khidamat ("Office of Services") was founded in Peshawar in 1984 by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden
to finance and support this effort. "Cold warriors" in the CIA and US State Department looked favorably on these efforts, and considered that they should be formally endorsed and expanded, perhaps along the lines of the international brigades
of the Spanish Civil War. "Bin Laden actually did some very good things", said Milton Bearden
, chief of the CIA's Islamabad station in the later 1980s. "He put a lot of money in a lot of right places in Afghanistan. He never came on the screen of any Americans as either a terrific asset or someone who was anti-American." The CIA denied, however, actually assisting the "Arab Afghans
" (as the Arab volunteers became known), or having direct contact with Bin Laden.
Arrested in the US, for the embassy bombings, was a former Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohamed
(sometimes called "al-Amriki", the American), who is alleged to have provided training and assistance to Mr Bin Laden's operatives. At that time, however, he was a member of the United States Army Special Forces
. FBI special agent Jack Cloonan calls him "bin Laden's first trainer". Originally an Egyptian army captain, in the 1980s Mohamed came to the US and became a supply sergeant to the Green Berets in Fort Bragg
. At the same time he was involved with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which "merged" with al-Qaeda in the 1990s), and later with Qaeda itself. Mohamed boasted of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had worked for the CIA in the earlier 1980s, but the agency supposedly dropped him after he boasted of his relationship. But Mohamed's behavior led his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, to believe he was still a US intelligence asset. ("I assumed the CIA", said Anderson.) In 1989 Mohamed trained anti-Soviet fighters in his spare time, apparently at the al-Khifah center in Brooklyn. He was "honorably discharged" from the US military in November 1989.
Another individual associated with the Brooklyn center was the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman
, a leading recruiter of mujaheddin, who obtained US entry visas with the help of the CIA in 1987 and 1990.
J. Michael Springmann, head of the non-immigrant visa section at the "CIA-dominated" US consulate in Jeddah
, Saudi Arabia
, in 1987–88, said he learned that the CIA had a "program to bring people to the United States for terrorist training, people recruited by the CIA and its asset Usama bin Laden, and the idea was to get them trained and send them back to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviets." "Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese." These "recruits without backgrounds" were given visas over Springmann's protests.
[T]hose directly recruited by the US ... went to Camp Peary — "the Farm", as the CIA's spy training centre in Virginia is known in the intelligence community ... At the Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills.
(who had been recruited through the Brooklyn center in the mid 1980s) joined in 1989, he was described as Qaeda's "third member".
Congressional testimony from then-DCI George Tenet
speaks of knowledge and analysis of Bin Laden, from his early years as a terrorist financier to his leadership of a worldwide network of terrorism based in Afghanistan.
According to Tenet, Bin Laden gained prominence during the Afghan war for his role in financing the recruitment, transportation, and training of Arab nationals who fought alongside the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviets during the 1980s. Tenet denied there had been any US government involvement with him until the early nineties. See Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden
.
Accounts differ on when the United States recognized bin Laden as an individual financier of terror, as opposed to when al-Qaida was recognized as a group.
In the early 1990s Ali Mohamed
, who had been a United States Army Special Forces
supply sergeant, returned to Afghanistan, where he gave training in al-Qaeda camps. According to FBI special agent Jack Cloonan, in one of Mohamed's first classes were Osama bin Laden
, Ayman al-Zawahiri
, and other al-Qaeda leaders. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, he was involved in planning the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa
, an Egyptian religious leader later jailed for the planned New York bombings. Even Sheikh Abdel-Rahman had, apparently, entered the US with the full knowledge of the CIA in 1990.
But by the mid-1990s, America's view of Al-Kifah had changed. It discovered that several of those charged with the World Trade Center bombing and the New York landmarks bombings were former Afghan veterans, recruited through the Brooklyn-based organisation. Many of those the US had trained and recruited for a war were still fighting: but now it was against America. A confidential CIA internal survey concluded that it was 'partly culpable' for the World Trade Center bomb, according to reports of the time. There had been blowback.
Jamal al-Fadl
(himself recruited through the Brooklyn center in the mid 1980s) was described as the "third member". Al-Fadl later "defected" to the CIA and provided the agency's Bin Laden unit with a great deal of evidence about al-Qaeda.
was a conspiracy, and a group of the conspirators were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. There has been no strong argument that al-Qaeda was involved, although there have been allegations, including by a former Director of Central Intelligence
, that Iraq supported the operational cell. In October 2001 in a PBS
interview, former Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey
argued a supposed link between Ramzi Youssef and the Iraqi intelligence services. He suggested the grand jury investigation turned up evidence pointing to Iraq that the Clinton Justice Department "brushed aside."
Neil Herman, who headed the FBI investigation, noted that despite Yasin's presence in Baghdad, there was no evidence of Iraqi support for the attack. "We looked at that rather extensively," he told CNN terrorism analyst Peter L. Bergen. "There were no ties to the Iraqi government." Bergen writes, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."
Claims that Saddam Hussein
was behind the bombing are based on the research of Laurie Mylroie
of the conservative American Enterprise Institute
.
March 1995 actions by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo
demonstrated that the use of WMD is no longer restricted to the battlefield. Japanese authorities have determined that the Aum was working on developing the chemical nerve agents sarin and VX. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which attacked Japanese civilians with deadly gas just one year ago (March 20, 1995) also tried to mine its own uranium in Australia and to buy Russian nuclear warheads.
is the only declassified subject in the 1996 Terrorism Review Responsibility for the attack was, at the time of publication of the Review, not determined.
Bin Ladin came to the attention of the CIA as an emerging terrorist threat during his stay in Sudan from 1991 to 1996.
The Agency, however, began to be concerned than bin Laden would extend his activities beyond Afghanistan. It experimented with various internal organizations that could focus on subjects such as bin Laden specifically and al-Qaeda generally.
In 1996 an experimental "virtual station" was launched, modeled on the agency's geographically-based stations, but based in Washington and dedicated to a particular transnational issue. It was placed under the Counterterrorist Center
(CTC), and, like the CTC, cut across disciplines and drew its personnel from widely across the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Michael Scheuer
, who up to then headed the Center's Islamic extremist branch, was asked to run it. Scheuer, who had noticed a stream of intelligence reports about Osama bin Laden
, suggested the station be dedicated to this particular individual. The station began to produce evidence that Bin Laden was not only a financier, but also an organizer of terror. Originally dubbed "Terrorist Financial Links" (TFL), the unit soon became rechristened the Bin Laden Issue Station
.
Jamal al-Fadl
, who defected to the CIA in spring 1996, began to provide the Station with a new image of the Qaeda leader: he was not only a terrorist financier, but a terrorist organizer too, and sought weapons of mass destruction. FBI special agent Dan Coleman (who together with his partner Jack Cloonan had been "seconded" to the Bin Laden Station) called him Qaeda's "Rosetta Stone
".
The declassified page of the 1998 Terrorism Review speaks of the release of hostages by Colombia's two major guerilla organizations, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Kidnapping is the only threat mentioned, with a warning of continued danger to US interests.
The Review makes no mention of other countries or threats, but only the cover and one page were even partially declassified.
launched a grand "Plan" to deal with al-Qaeda. In preparation, he selected new leadership for the Counterterrorist Center
(CTC). He placed Cofer Black
in charge of the CTC, and "Rich B" (a "top-flight executive" from Tenet's own leadership group) in charge of the CTC's Bin Laden unit
. Tenet assigned the CTC to develop the Plan. The proposals, brought out in September, sought to penetrate Qaeda's "Afghan sanctuary" with US and Afghan agents, in order to obtain information on and mount operations against Bin Laden's network. In October, officers from the Bin Laden unit visited northern Afghanistan
. Once the Plan was finalized, the Agency created a "Qaeda cell" (whose functions overlapped those of the CTC's Bin Laden unit
) to give operational leadership to the effort. CIA intelligence chief Charles E. Allen
to set up a "Qaeda cell" was put in charge of the tactical execution of the Plan. i
The CIA concentrated its inadequate financial resources on the Plan, so that at least some of its more modest aspirations were realized. Intelligence collection efforts on bin Laden and al-Qaeda increased significantly from 1999. "By 9/11", said Tenet, "a map would show that these collection programs and human [reporting] networks were in place in such numbers as to nearly cover Afghanistan". (But this excluded Bin Laden's inner circle itself.)
A heavily redacted CIA document, the 1999 Terrorism Review, reveals concern with Libyan support of terrorism, through its External Security Organization (ESO).
The ESO is described as responsible for surveillance, assassination, and kidnapping of Libyan dissidents outside the country; examples were given from actions in the United Kingdom and Egypt
. Libya was also described as attempting to build influence in sub-Saharan Africa, supporting a range of Palestinian rejectionist groups, and giving funds and equipment to the Moro Islamic Liberation Organization and Abu Sayyaf
Group in the Philippines
.
In addition, the World Anti-Imperialist Center (Mahatba) and the World Islamic Call Society (WICS) were described as part of terrorist infrastructure. This review does not mention any country, other than Libya, or non-national actor as a sponsor of terrorism, as opposed to an operational terrorist group.
to investigate "creating a strategic assessment capability". This led to the creation of the Strategic Assessments Branch
in 2001.
, the USS Cole
, which was docked in Aden
Harbor, Yemen
. The blast blew a hole 20 feet (6.1 m) high and 40 feet (12.2 m) wide in the ship's hull, killed 17 of the ship's crew and injured 30. "With just slightly more skilled execution, CIA analysts later concluded, the bombers would have killed three hundred and sent the destroyer to the bottom." See USS Cole bombing
for details of the attack and response to it.
The attack on the USS Cole apparently came out of the blue. However Kie Fallis at the Defense Intelligence Agency
, from "data mining and analysis", had "predicted" in early autumn 2000 a Qaeda attack by an explosives-laden small boat against a US warship. And in late September 2000 the DIA experimental data-mining operation Able Danger
had uncovered information of increased Qaeda "activity" in Aden
Harbor, 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".
and others became advocates of arming the Predator with missiles to try to assassinate Bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders.
In the spring of 2001, CIA officers evaluated the forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud
, and found his strength less than the previous fall. While the officers gave him cash and supplies, and received intelligence on the Taliban, they did not have the authority to build back his fighting strength against the Taliban.
While the US has had a series of Presidential Executive Orders banning assassinations, none of those Orders actually defined assassination. Using dictionary rather than statutory definition, a common definition is "murder
by surprise for political purposes". Jeffrey Addicott argues that if murder is generally accepted as an illegal act in US and international law, so if assassination is a form of murder, the Orders cannot be making legal something that is already illegal.
The Hague and Geneva Conventions did not consider non-national actors as belligerents in general war. The Conventions do consider spontaneous rising against invasion and civil war as having lawful combatants, but there are much more restrictions of the status, as legal combatants, of fighters who came to a war from an external country. This discussion will not address the controversial issue of illegal combatants, but, following Addicott's reasoning, assumes that violence, in defense to an attack, is legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Note that before the attackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks
were identified, the US invoked the NATO treaty, without objection, as a member state that had been attacked. "In the War on Terror, it is beyond legal dispute that the virtual-State al-Qa’eda terrorists are aggressors and that the United States is engaging in self-defense when using violence against them."
Black and others became advocates of arming the Predator with AGM-114 Hellfire
missiles to try to kill Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. But there were both legal and technical issues. Tenet in particular was concerned about the CIA moving back into the business of targeted killing. And a series of live-fire tests in the Nevada Desert in summer 2001 produced mixed results.
In June 2001, at a test site in Nevada in the US, CIA and Air Force personnel built a replica of Bin Laden's villa in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Predator controllers tested aiming and firing a Predator missile at the house, and post-strike analysis showed it would have killed anyone in the targeted room. The significance of this demonstration was called a "holy grail" by one participant. A weapon now existed which, at long range, could kill Bin Laden shortly after finding him. Practice runs proved reliable, but, according to the Washington Post, the Bush Administration refrained from such action. On September 4, a new set of directives called for increasing pressure against the Taliban until they either ejected al-Qaeda or faced a serious threat to their continued power. No decision on using this capability had reached President Bush
by September 11.
Tenet advised cautiously at the Cabinet-level Principals Committee on September 4, 2001. If the Cabinet wanted to empower the CIA to field a lethal drone, he said, "they should do so with their eyes wide open, fully aware of the potential fallout if there were a controversial or mistaken strike". National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
concluded that the armed Predator was required, but evidently not ready. She advised the CIA to consider re-starting reconnaissance flights. The "previously reluctant" Tenet then ordered the Agency to do so. The CIA was authorized to "deploy the system with weapons-capable aircraft".
, which Tenet had assigned to advise on setting up a strategic assessment capability, reported back in March. "In [an] early Spring 2001 briefing to the DCI, [the] CTC requested hiring a small group of contractors not involved in day-to-day crises to digest vast quantities of information and develop targeting strategies. The briefing emphasized that the unit needed people, not money."
The Strategic Assessments Branch
of the Counterterrorist Center was formally set up in July. But it struggled to find personnel. The branch's chief reported for duty on September 10, 2001.
rejected the criticism, citing the Agency's planning efforts especially over the preceding two years. His response came in a briefing held on September 15, 2001, where he presented the Worldwide Attack Matrix
, a classified document describing covert CIA anti-terror operations in eighty countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The actions, underway or being recommended, would range from "routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks." The plans, if carried out, "would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history."
Tenet said that the CIA's efforts had put the Agency in a position to respond rapidly and effectively to the attacks, both in the "Afghan sanctuary" and in "ninety-two countries around the world".
At the Cabinet-level Principals Committee meeting on terrorism of September 4, 2001, Tenet warned of the dangers of a controversial or mistaken strike with an under-tested armed drone. After the meeting, the CIA resumed reconnaissance flights, the drones now being weapons-capable but as yet unarmed.
operatives in a car travelling through Yemen
had been killed by a missile launched from a CIA-controlled Predator drone
(a medium-altitude, remote-controlled aircraft).
In 2004, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC-TV) international affairs program "Foreign Correspondent" investigated this targeted killing and the involvement of then U.S. Ambassador as part of a special report titled "The Yemen Option". The report also examined the evolving tactics and countermeasures in dealing with Al Qaeda inspired attacks. Transcript at: http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2004/s1054112.htm
, a Taliban commander and al-Qaeda facilitator, in an apparent Predator missile strike in South Waziristan
.
inside Pakistan
.
In December 2005, Abu Hamza Rabia
, an Egyptian who was reportedly al-Qaeda's third in command, was killed in a surprise drone attack in North Waziristan.
On January 13, 2006, the CIA launched an airstrike on Damadola
, a Pakistani village near the Afghan border, where they believed Ayman al-Zawahiri
was located. The airstrike killed a number of civilians but al-Zawahiri apparently was not among them. The Pakistani government issued a protest against the US attack, which it considered violated its sovereignty.
, one al-Qaeda's senior figures, was killed in a targeted killing Predator rocket attack in Pakistan. Some intelligence sources describe him as the number three leader of al-Qaeda.
In July 2008, Abu Khabab al-Masri, suspected leader of al-Qaeda's chemical and biological weapons efforts, was killed in an attack by U.S. drone-launched missiles on a house in South Waziristan in Pakistan.
In October 2008, Khalid Habib
, al-Qaeda regional operations commander in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was killed by a missile launched by a Predator in South Waziristan, Pakistan.
In November 2008, Rashid Rauf
, British/Pakistani suspected planner of a 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot
, was killed by a missile launched from a U.S. drone in North Waziristan.
In January 2009, Usama al-Kini
and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan
, alleged orchestrators of the 1998 United States embassy bombings
in Kenya
and Tanzania
, were killed in a Predator strike in northern Pakistan.
In August 2009, Baitullah Mehsud
, leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
(TTP), was killed in a U.S. drone missile attack in Waziristan.
, Afghanistan
. Eight people, among them at least six CIA officers, including the chief of the base, were killed and six others seriously wounded in the attack. The attack was the second most deadliest carried out against the CIA, after the 1983 United States Embassy bombing
in Beirut, Lebanon, and was a major setback for the intelligence agency's operations.
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
(CIA) related to terrorism. Especially after the CIA lost its coordinating role over the entire Intelligence Community (IC), it is impossible to understand US counterterrorism by looking at the CIA alone. Coordinating structures have been created by each president to fit his administrative style and the perceived level of threat.
The US has a different counterterrorist structure than other close allies, such as Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom. Each has a structure that fits its particular legal system and culture; there is no ideal solution. A continuing issue is whether there needs to be a domestic intelligence service separate from the FBI, which has had difficulty in breaking away from its law enforcement roots and cooperating with other intelligence services.
The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) is no longer in the CIA proper, but is in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). NCTC, however, contains personnel from the CIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
(FBI) of the Department of Justice
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
, and other members of the IC. A counterterrorism center did exist in the CIA before the NCTC was established.
Given the restrictions of the National Security Act of 1947
National Security Act of 1947
The National Security Act of 1947 was signed by United States President Harry S. Truman on July 26, 1947, and realigned and reorganized the U.S. Armed Forces, foreign policy, and Intelligence Community apparatus in the aftermath of World War II...
, which created the CIA but strictly forbade it from having any domestic police authority, the role of the CIA still has multiple dimensions. The National Clandestine Service (NCS) of the CIA can infiltrate or otherwise gain human intelligence (HUMINT
HUMINT
HUMINT, a syllabic abbreviation of the words HUMan INTelligence, refers to intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact, as opposed to the more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as SIGINT, IMINT and MASINT...
) from terrorist organizations, their supporters, or from friendly foreign intelligence services (FIS). The NCS has a covert operations capability that, possibly in combination with military units from the United States Special Operations Command
United States Special Operations Command
The United States Special Operations Command is the Unified Combatant Command charged with overseeing the various Special Operations Commands of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps of the United States Armed Forces. The command is part of the Department of Defense...
(USSOCOM), may take direct action
Direct action (military)
In the context of military special operations, direct action consists of: "Short-duration strikes and other small-scale offensive actions conducted as a special operation in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments and which employ specialized military capabilities to seize, destroy,...
against terrorist groups outside the United States.
Above all, the key CIA counterterror partner is the FBI, which has the domestic operational responsibility for counterterrorism, both domestic intelligence collection and domestic police work. In the highly decentralized police system of the United States, the FBI also provides liaison and operates cooperatively with state and local police agencies, as well as with relevant Federal units. For example, the United States Coast Guard
United States Coast Guard
The United States Coast Guard is a branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven U.S. uniformed services. The Coast Guard is a maritime, military, multi-mission service unique among the military branches for having a maritime law enforcement mission and a federal regulatory agency...
has an important role in preventing terrorist infiltration by sea. Military units have a specialized Counterintelligence Force Protection Source Operations capability to protect their personnel and operations.
Intelligence Community view of terrorism
Contrary to popular belief, the US intelligence community was dealing with aspects of terrorism long before the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
. Those aspects included the support of guerillas against the Soviets, in Southeast Asia, and other places where the guerrillas' methods may have included terror. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the US worked with government to suppress terror. While government research suggests personality traits that may be common to a substantial number of terrorists, terror has few other constants. It certainly is not restricted to Muslims. It has taken place on every continent except Antarctica.
In all these cases, intelligence support clearly was necessary. In some of them, clandestine intelligence collection and covert action, by CIA personnel or those they sponsored, dealt with both sides of the terrorist and counterterrorist roles.
Many studies of the analysis of, and countermeasures to, terrorism remain classified. Unclassified CIA documents on terrorism go back at least into the late 1970s. At that time, Western Europe often had opposing terrorist groups in the same conflict, such as nationalists and separatists in Northern Ireland, Spanish nationalists and Basque separatists, Turkey, Transnational terrorism was still unusual, with the report noting that the Basque ETA group was active in France as well as Spain.
There are relevant observations from government reports by researchers who have various levels of access into the IC, including the Federal Research Division
Federal Research Division
The Federal Research Division is the research and analysis unit of the United States Library of Congress.The Federal Research Division provides directed research and analysis on domestic and international subjects to agencies of the United States government, the District of Columbia, and...
(FRD) and Congressional Research Service
Congressional Research Service
The Congressional Research Service , known as "Congress's think tank", is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a...
of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
. A 1999 FRD study examined some changes from terrorists of the past, especially the emergence of terrorist acts carried out by individuals and members of small, ad hoc groups largely unknown to security organizations. Tactics, as well as sources, had changed, with the greater use of suicide attacks and attacks by women and children.
A very significant concern was the possible use, by terrorists, of weapons of mass destruction
Weapons of mass destruction
A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...
(WMD).
Weapons of mass destruction
Terrorists have already made attacks using WMD. This is not a hypothetical fear, but it also must be assessed in terms of possible damage. A 1996 CIA presentation reviewed the history to date.Researchers for a 1999 General Accounting Office study had classified access.
Terrorists by ideology and region
Terrorism is not a recent phenomenon. The Zealots of the first century assassinated both Romans, and Jews who did not want to revolt against the Romans. In the modern world, there are several categories of terrorists, including guerillas who use terror as one of their weapons, groups that principally use terror alone, and individuals. Terrorists may be motivated by a political ideology of extremism, nationalism, religion, or combinations of all.HUMINT
One of the biggest challenges in dealing with relatively small terrorist groups is that the members are usually known one another, or at least there is a chain of individuals that can vouch for a recruit. These social bonds have led to the refinement of the clandestine cell systemClandestine cell system
A clandestine cell structure is a method for organizing a group of people in such a way that it can more effectively resist penetration by an opposing organization. Depending on the group's philosophy, its operational area, the communications technologies available, and the nature of the mission,...
in such groups. The combination of familiarity and compartmentalization make it extremely difficult to introduce human agents to the groups; it is more likely that human intelligence can be gained by subverting someone who is already a member, or perhaps is indirectly associated (e.g., a banker or arms dealer).
Efforts to use HUMINT
HUMINT
HUMINT, a syllabic abbreviation of the words HUMan INTelligence, refers to intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact, as opposed to the more technical intelligence gathering disciplines such as SIGINT, IMINT and MASINT...
operations with non-official cover
Non-official cover
Non-official cover is a term used in espionage, particularly by national intelligence services, for agents or operatives who assume covert roles in organizations without ties to the government for which they work. Such agents or operatives are typically abbreviated in espionage lingo as a NOC...
, especially in the areas outside the groups' staging areas, have been disappointing. Stepped-up efforts to use non-official cover
Non-official cover
Non-official cover is a term used in espionage, particularly by national intelligence services, for agents or operatives who assume covert roles in organizations without ties to the government for which they work. Such agents or operatives are typically abbreviated in espionage lingo as a NOC...
, especially in Europe, began by creating covers in investment banks and consulting firms. Only several years later was it realized that terrorists would have little to do with such organizations. Another realization is even with excellent cover, the HUMINT successes would be unlikely to recruit people deep inside the terrorist cells.
Where HUMINT had more potential, and where the cover organizations needed to change to help find appropriate targets, was on the fringes of the terrorist organizations, either groups from which the group would need goods or services, or from people with awareness of the groups but not supporting them. Even if a group such as al-Qaeda had its own ships, there are reports that 15 cargo ships are linked to al-Qaeda. the activities of those ships, at ports, might draw the attention of security officials, or even low-level dockworkers or craftsmen. .
Another potential target could be moderate Muslims that do not want to take up an overt role against jihadists, but could supply information. The cover for approaching such persons could be any of a wide range of businesses and institutions.
Foreign specialists in explosives, WMD, and other warfare methods might come to CIA notice in their countries of origin. By tracking their movements, the specialists-for-hire might lead to trusted persons within the groups. Once a member is identified, other intelligence collection methods could be directed at his communications, surveillance of his home and place of work, etc.
There has been significant controversy, without there being classified Congressional views, of black sites for interrogating suspects, as well as the Guantanamo base. A separate role is played by regional Counterterrorist Intelligence Center
Counterterrorist Intelligence Center
A Counterterrorist Intelligence Center is, according to a Washington Post November 18, 2005 front page article by Dana Priest, a counterterrorist operations center run jointly by the CIA and foreign intelligence services as part of the US "War on Terror" .- Description of CTIC :According to Dana...
s.
SIGINT
While some information was gained, early in campaigns against terror groups, from SIGINT (communications intelligence), groups have realized that threat and will often give up the speed of electronic communications for the security of messengers, who may carry encrypted messages they do not know how to read, or perhaps have memorized messages.The actual interception of messages probably is not done by the CIA, but by NSA or possibly Service Cryptologic Elements (SCE): tactical SIGINT detachments attached to military tactical units. Important communications intercepts have been achieved, with the results clearly available to CIA. There are cases, however, where a joint CIA-NSA organization places clandestine intercept equipment. The National Security Archive commented, "In 1987, Deputy Director for Science and Technology Evan Hineman established... a new Office for Special Projects. concerned not with satellites, but with emplaced sensors – sensors that could be placed in a fixed location to collect signals intelligence or measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) about a specific target. Such sensors had been used to monitor Chinese missile tests, Soviet laser activity, military movements, and foreign nuclear programs. The office was established to bring together scientists from the DS&T’s Office of SIGINT Operations, who designed such systems, with operators from the Directorate of Operations, who were responsible for transporting the devices to their clandestine locations and installing them.
While communications intercepts are usually highly classified, they have come up in US Congressional testimony on terrorism. For example, an FBI official testified with regard to the 1998 United States embassy bombings
1998 United States embassy bombings
The 1998 United States embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the East African capitals of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The date of the...
Kenya, and Tanzania, which took place so closely in time that the terrorist teams can reasonably be assumed to have coordinated their operations in near real-time.
There was independent proof of the involvement of Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda and EIJ Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the bombings. First, the would-be suicide bomber, al-Owhali, ran away from the bomb truck at the last minute and survived. However, he had no money or passport or plan by which to escape Kenya. Days later, he called a telephone number in Yemen and thus arranged to have money transferred to him in Kenya. That same telephone number in Yemen was contacted by Osama Bin Laden's satellite phone on the same days that al-Owhali was arranging to get money.
They have also been revealed in legal proceedings against terrorists, such as United States vs. Osama bin Laden et al., indictment, Nov. 4, 1998, and updates.
IMINT
The sort of imagery intelligence ((IMINTIMINT
Imagery Intelligence , is an intelligence gathering discipline which collects information via satellite and aerial photography. As a means of collecting intelligence, IMINT is a subset of intelligence collection management, which, in turn, is a subset of intelligence cycle management...
), often from satellites, used against nation-states is of limited use in tracking the movement of groups of small size and little physical infrastructure. More success has come from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which are hard to see and hear, to do such things as follow cars, or loiter above a building, photographic traffic in and out, often with low-light or infrared sensors that work in apparent darkness.
The CIA experimented with a small remote-controlled reconnaissance aircraft, the MQ-1 Predator, to try to spot Bin Laden in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
. A series of flights in autumn 2000, overseen by CTC officials and flown by USAF drone pilots from a control room at the CIA's Langley headquarters, produced probable sightings of the Qaeda leader.
FININT
Financial intelligenceFinancial intelligence
Financial Intelligence is the gathering of information about the financial affairs of entities of interest, to understand their nature and capabilities, and predict their intentions...
– "following the money" – often can trace the organization behind a particular attack. Once that organization is identified, value transfers from it can point to other operational cells. The United States Department of the Treasury
United States Department of the Treasury
The Department of the Treasury is an executive department and the treasury of the United States federal government. It was established by an Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue...
's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has the power to "freeze" the accounts of organizations suspected of funding terrorist activities.
Terrorist groups use three types of financing, which are increasingly difficult to track by U.S. intelligence including CIA:
-
- Charities, which use conventional financial institutions and value transfer,
- Informal value transfer systemInformal value transfer systemAn informal value transfer system refers to any system, mechanism, or network of people that receives money for the purpose of making the funds or an equivalent value payable to a third party in another geographic location, whether or not in the same form...
s such as hawala and hindi - "Commodities- or trade-based money laundering includes the smuggling of bulk cash and the evasion of federal reporting requirements used to track money laundering with commodities such as diamonds, precious metals, gold, and tobacco." CIA is most likely to gain awareness of commodities and trade transfers outside the United States.
According to the Center for Defense Information
Center for Defense Information
The Center for Defense Information , founded in 1972 by retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Gene La Rocque, states that it is dedicated to strengthening national and international security through international cooperation, reduced reliance on unilateral military power to resolve conflict, reduced...
, intelligence agencies help OFAC build its "freeze list" by sending it lists of individuals and organizations believed to be associated with terror. Not all such suspects go onto the freeze list, since the intelligence community can use financial transactions as a means of tracking them.
One of the challenges of anti-terrorist FININT is that surveillance of transactions only works when the value transfers go through conventional, regulated banks and other financial institutions. Many cultures use informal value transfer system
Informal value transfer system
An informal value transfer system refers to any system, mechanism, or network of people that receives money for the purpose of making the funds or an equivalent value payable to a third party in another geographic location, whether or not in the same form...
s, such as the hawala
Hawala
Hawala is an informal value transfer system based on the performance and honor of a huge network of money brokers, which are primarily located in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and South Asia...
widely used in the Middle East and Asia, where value is transferred through a network of brokers, who operate with funds often not in banks, with the value transfer orders through personal communications among brokers. The brokers know one another and operate on a paperless honor system.
A study from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis [India] describes "narco-terrorism" as "the nexus between narcotics and terrorism...It is recognised as one of the oldest and most dependable sources of terrorist financing
Terrorist Financing
Terrorist financing came into limelight after the events of terrorism on 9/11. The US passed the USA PATRIOT Act to, among other reasons, attempt thwarting the financing of terrorism and anti-money laundering making sure these were given some sort of adequate focus by US financial institutions...
, primarily because of the magnitudes of finance involved in both the activities." The study indicates that informal value transfer systems, known "... [in] India it is known as hawala, in Pakistan as hundi, in China fei qian (flying money), in Philippines as black market peso exchange" are important means of transferring funds to terrorist organizations.
Some hawala brokers have placed some of their reserve funds in banks, where they have been frozen by OFAC. On Nov. 7, 2001, the Treasury Department made raids and freezes to shut down two hawala networks, Al Barakaat and Al Taqwa, both believed to be funneling millions of dollars from the United States to abroad to support terrorist activities. In addition to the placement of 62 people and groups associated with the two organizations on the asset freeze list, FBI and U.S. Customs agents raided the two networks' offices in six U.S cities.
According to CDI,
The founder of Al Barakaat, Shaykh Ahmed Nur Jimale, is believed to be an associate of bin Laden who invested in and is still an owner of the organization. Al Barakaat is a financial, telecommunications and construction group headquartered in Dubai and operating largely out of Somalia. It was founded in 1989 and operates in 40 countries around the world. ... The Treasury Department said the raids on Nov. 7 resulted in the blocking of approximately $971,000 in Al Barakaat assets.
Hawala plays an important role in the Afghan drug economy, and in drug trade worldwide.
Analytic approach
The National Security Archive makes the point that the US government and intelligence community did not suddenly come upon terrorism on September 11, 2001. Understanding the IC and political perceptions of the past help predict the future, identify weaknesses, and develop strategies.
...at the beginning of the Reagan administration, Secretary of StateUnited States Secretary of StateThe United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
Alexander HaigAlexander HaigAlexander Meigs Haig, Jr. was a United States Army general who served as the United States Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan and White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford...
announced that opposition to terrorism would replace the Carter administration’s focus on advancing human rights throughout the world. Although opposition to terrorism never really became the primary focus of the Reagan administration or successor administrations, each of these paid significant attention to the issue and produced many important documents that shed light on the policy choices faced today. Terrorism has been the subject of numerous presidential and Defense Department directives as well as executive orders. Terrorist groups and terrorist acts have been the focus of reports by both executive branch agencies (for example, the State Department, CIA, and FBI) as well as Congressional bodies – including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Congressional Research Service. The General Accounting Office has also produced several dozen reports evaluating the U.S. government’s ability to prevent or mitigate terrorist strikes...
CIA's Directorate of Intelligence produces analytic products that can help identify terrorist groups, their structure, and plans. These may benefit from signals intelligence from the National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
(NSA), from imagery intelligence from the National Reconnaissance Office
National Reconnaissance Office
The National Reconnaissance Office , located in Chantilly, Virginia, is one of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. It designs, builds, and operates the spy satellites of the United States government.-Mission:...
(NRO) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is an agency of the federal government of the United States with the primary mission of collecting, analyzing and distributing geospatial intelligence in support of national security. NGA was formerly known as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency ...
(NGA), from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is a bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury that collects and analyzes information about financial transactions in order to combat money laundering, terrorist financiers, and other financial crimes.As reflected in its name, the Financial...
(FinCEN) of the Department of the Treasury
United States Department of the Treasury
The Department of the Treasury is an executive department and the treasury of the United States federal government. It was established by an Act of Congress in 1789 to manage government revenue...
, and from other specialized agencies.
Regular research
The Department of State, with CIA assistance, prepares an annual volume called Patterns in Terrorism. FBI reporting is more irregular, but does do problem descriptions as well as specific reports.While the Congressional Research Service
Congressional Research Service
The Congressional Research Service , known as "Congress's think tank", is the public policy research arm of the United States Congress. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS works exclusively and directly for Members of Congress, their Committees and staff on a...
technically is prohibited from making its reports automatically available to the public, several legislative efforts are underway to change this, and, in practice, its reports are often Internet-accessible within a few days of issue, typically on the Federation of American Scientists
Federation of American Scientists
The Federation of American Scientists is a nonpartisan, 501 organization intent on using science and scientific analysis to attempt make the world more secure. FAS was founded in 1945 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs...
website.
Virtual station and cross-functional team research
While the initial implementation, Bin Laden Issue StationBin Laden Issue Station
The Bin Laden Issue Station was a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden.Soon after its creation the Station developed a new, deadlier vision of bin Laden's activities. In 1999 the CIA inaugurated a grand "Plan" against al-Qaeda, but struggled to find the...
, did not work well, there has been an Intelligence Community effort to avoid the problems of stovepiping
Stovepiping
Stovepiping is a metaphorical term which recalls a stovepipe's function as an isolated vertical conduit, and has been used, in the context of intelligence, to describe several ways in which raw intelligence information may be presented without proper context...
, especially where it involves lack of communication between analysts and operators. There is a continuing controversy on how to be sure Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
(FBI) information gets to the analysts; the FBI culture has been extremely decentralized, so "dots to be connected" in two field offices were not shared, although they might have been a warning of the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
.
The overall problems of stovepiping and encouraging cross-functional teams, in the context of terrorism, has been addressed, among other groups, by the House Intelligence Committee. One of their chief recommendations was:
FBI's main problem going forward is to overcome its information sharing failures. "Ensuring adequate information sharing" should be communicated throughout the Bureau as the Director's top priority, and a clear strategy incorporating the personnel dimension, the technical dimension, and the legal dimension of the information-sharing problem should be developed and communicated immediately.
Their recommendations for the CIA included:
CIA leadership must ensure that HUMINT collection remains a central core competency of the agency, and should develop additional operational tools, in conjunction with other appropriate agencies (FBI, etc,), penetrate terrorist cells, disrupt terrorist operations and capture and render terrorists to law enforcement as appropriate. More core collectors need to be put on the streets.
ClA should ensure that a management structure is in place to steward the multiyear investments needed to build new platforms to collect on terrorist targets. CIA must also ensure sufficient numbers of unilateral CT slots in field stations and bases.
CIA should lead an effort to improve watchlisting to ensure that all relevant agencies, including FBI, Homeland Security, and others, have access to a common database of up-to-date terrorist person-related data collected by US government agencies and other appropriate sources. The creation of a terrorism watchlisting unit at CIA may be a useful first step.
Require all new case officers and analysts to achieve a "level 3" language proficiency prior to initial deployment, and devise a mechanism for ensuring language skill maintenance is incentivized and directly tied to performance evaluation.
CIA should take immediate and sustained steps to dramatically improve all aspects of its CT training program. Establish structures in CTC (Counterterrorism Center) in such a manner that ensures a normal career path for these officers. Incorporate counterterrorism-related skill development in all appropriate training for case officers and analysts.
Internal policies, such as CTC's 'no threshold' threat reporting policy, should be reviewed and modified to ensure that consumers are getting the most reliable reporting and that sufficient analysis is applied to that product in advance of its wholesale dissemination, wherever possible.
The 1995 guidelines must be rescinded immediately, and replaced with new guidelines that balance concerns about human rights behavior and law breaking with the need for flexibility to take advantage of opportunities to gather information on terrorist activities, as required by law.
Under Porter Goss, for a variety of reasons including innovation, CIA has proposed moving its National Resources Division concerned with issues in the US, to Denver, letting it work more freely than under Headquarters bureaucracy. Some officers believe this is a bad idea and would hurt information sharing, the critical problem with the FBI. With due regard to the prohibition on the CIA having any domestic law enforcement powers,
... FBI is having significant problems developing its own domestic intelligence branch and the CIA is generally viewed across the intelligence community as more experienced and skilled at handling foreign informants who eventually return abroad, where the CIA has the lead in intelligence gathering and operations.
Regional analytic operations
See Counterterrorist Intelligence CenterCounterterrorist Intelligence Center
A Counterterrorist Intelligence Center is, according to a Washington Post November 18, 2005 front page article by Dana Priest, a counterterrorist operations center run jointly by the CIA and foreign intelligence services as part of the US "War on Terror" .- Description of CTIC :According to Dana...
s. The CIA (and predecessors) has a long history of placing selected collection and analytic functions (e.g., Foreign Broadcast Information Service
Foreign Broadcast Information Service
Foreign Broadcast Information Service was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the...
intercept locations) in places where they can coordinate with regional intelligence agencies, and also have access to people with native-level understanding of languages and culture.
Intelligence and terrorism in the 1970s
While there were no major foreign terror actions in the US during the early part decade, there were actions against US personnel and facilities in other countries. Terrorism was definitely present as a worldwide phenomenon, and the CIA produced regular reports on it. Attacks on US soil started in 1975.1970
The UruguayUruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
an Tupamaros
Tupamaros
Tupamaros, also known as the MLN-T , was an urban guerrilla organization in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. The MLN-T is inextricably linked to its most important leader, Raúl Sendic, and his brand of social politics...
terrorist group kidnapped and killed United States Agency for International Development
United States Agency for International Development
The United States Agency for International Development is the United States federal government agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid. President John F. Kennedy created USAID in 1961 by executive order to implement development assistance programs in the areas...
Police adviser Dan Mitrione; his body was found on August 10.
1972
Within the context of nationalist terror, multiple Irish Republican ArmyIrish Republican Army
The Irish Republican Army was an Irish republican revolutionary military organisation. It was descended from the Irish Volunteers, an organisation established on 25 November 1913 that staged the Easter Rising in April 1916...
bombings, starting on "Bloody Friday" (July 21), took place in Northern Ireland.
The best known terrorist in 1972 was the kidnapping and killing of Israeli Olympic team members, in the Munich massacre
Munich massacre
The Munich massacre is an informal name for events that occurred during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Bavaria in southern West Germany, when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and eventually killed by the Palestinian group Black September. Members of Black September...
by the Palestinian group, Black September
Black September (group)
The Black September Organization was a Palestinian paramilitary group, founded in 1970. It was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and officials, and fatal shooting of a West German policeman, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, their most publicized event...
. West German response was ad hoc and poorly executed, resulting in the deaths of all hostages, several terrorists, and a German police officer. This incident focused world attention on the need for early warning, hostage rescue, and, with great controversy, preemptive and retaliatory attacks on terrorists.
1973
Black SeptemberBlack September (group)
The Black September Organization was a Palestinian paramilitary group, founded in 1970. It was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of eleven Israeli athletes and officials, and fatal shooting of a West German policeman, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, their most publicized event...
attacked the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan. The terrorists killed the US ambassador, Cleo Noel and other diplomats.
In Guadalajara
Guadalajara, Jalisco
Guadalajara is the capital of the Mexican state of Jalisco, and the seat of the municipality of Guadalajara. The city is located in the central region of Jalisco in the western-pacific area of Mexico. With a population of 1,564,514 it is Mexico's second most populous municipality...
, Mexico, the People's Revolutionary Armed Forces killed the US consul general.
1974
At Los Angeles Airport, 17 people were injured and 2 were killed at LAX when a bomb exploded near the Pan Am ticket area.1975
In January, Puerto Rican nationalists bombed a Wall Street bar, killing four and injuring 60; 2 days later, the Weather Underground claims responsibility for an explosion in a bathroom at the U.S. Department of State in Washington.1976
The hijacking of an Air France passenger aircraft, eventually arriving at EntebbeEntebbe
Entebbe is a major town in Central Uganda. Located on a Lake Victoria peninsula, the town was at one time, the seat of government for the Protectorate of Uganda, prior to Independence in 1962...
, Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
pointed to the need for international antiterrorist cooperation, and also demonstrated the ability to rescue hostages at long range (i.e., the Israeli Operation Entebbe
Operation Entebbe
Operation Entebbe was a counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission carried out by the Special Forces of the Israel Defense Forces at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on 4 July 1976. A week earlier, on 27 June, an Air France plane with 248 passengers was hijacked by Palestinian and German terrorists and...
). This became a prototype for other hostage rescue forces.
Terrorism in the US was not necessarily directed at US organizations. Exiled Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier was killed by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Subsequent investigations suggest the bombers may have had CIA ties in Chile.
"... in February 1976, President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order (EO) 11905 which forbade all U.S. government employees from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassination" (Section 5(g)). Ford's EO was superseded by President Jimmy Carter's EO 12036, which tightened restrictions on intelligence agencies. The ban on assassinations was continued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, (EO 12333, Sec 2.11) and extended to apply specifically to intelligence agencies. This ban remains in effect today, although challenges have been mounted in each of the last two years by Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga.
1978
Also see EO 12036, signed by President Carter in 1978, and the current Executive Order, EO 12333, signed by President Reagan in 1981, continued the requirement for oversight to maintain the proper balance between the acquisition of essential information by the Intelligence Community, and the protection of individuals' constitutional and statutory rights.Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades later killed. This brought additional NATO attention to the problem.
1979
In January, Iranian militants captured the buildings and staff of the US embassy in Teheran. A number of CIA operational documents were reconstructed.In November, there was Muslim-on-Muslim violence with the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. French security forces assisted the Saudis in recapturing the building, indicating that ad hoc alliances would form for both terrorism and counterterrorism.
Intelligence and terrorism in the 1980s
It became increasingly obvious, in the 1980s, that there is no generally accepted definition of terrorism, as a unique offense. For example, many discussions of terrorism emphasize it is directed against noncombatants. World War II kamikazeKamikaze
The were suicide attacks by military aviators from the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy as many warships as possible....
suicide attack
Suicide attack
A suicide attack is a type of attack in which the attacker expects or intends to die in the process.- Historical :...
s were terrifying for the sailors against which they were directed, but the attacks were exclusively directed at military targets, by the regular military of a nation-state.
Attacks by non-national actors, such as the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing
1983 Beirut barracks bombing
The Beirut Barracks Bombing occurred during the Lebanese Civil War, when two truck bombs struck separate buildings housing United States and French military forces—members of the Multinational Force in Lebanon—killing 299 American and French servicemen...
of US and French troops under UN auspices, are more problematic. The Beirut attacks are usually called "terrorism" in news reports, but, if terrorism is assumed to be against noncombatants, they may not qualify. The organizers and attackers might well be categorized as illegal combatants under the Geneva Convention, but the Conventions do not define terrorism.
During this decade, the US supported Muslim fighters against the Soviets in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
. The training and arms supplied may have helped start transnational jihadist groups.
1982
In April 1982, President Ronald ReaganRonald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 30 dealing with responses to armed attacks on U.S. citizens or assets. The NSDD created a coordinating body, the Interdepartmental Group on Terrorism, to develop and assign to various executive agencies specific responsibilities when terrorist incidents occurred. The objective was to have in place, before an incident occurred, guidelines for such matters as lines of authority, intelligence responsibilities, and response training. A Special Situation Group (SSG) was established to advise the president, and lead agencies to coordinate responses were named.
-
- For international terrorist incidents outside U.S. territory, the State Department had the lead role.
- For incidents, the Justice Department was to be the lead agency with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI0 in the lead for operational response.
- For plane hijackings within the "special jurisdiction of the United States, the lead agency was the Federal Aviation Administration.
- For planning and managing public health aspects of terrorist incidents, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was the responsible agency.
Supporting the SSG was a Terrorist Incident Working Group with representatives from the Departments of State and Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, the FBI, FEMA, and the National Security Staff. It was to give "direct operational support…and to provide advice and recommendations during an incident" to the SSG.
In November 1982, following the establishment of the DoD Inspector General, the Deputy Secretary of Defense directed that the Inspector General for Intelligence be redesignated as the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (Intelligence Oversight) (ATSD (IO)). Today, the ATSD (IO) reports on Intelligence Oversight activities at least quarterly to the Secretary of Defense and, through him, to the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), a standing committee of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).
1983
The major terrorist incident was the bombing of a UN observer force in Beirut, which led to considerable rethinking of U.S. rules of engagement, the deterrent effect of a US presence, and the issue of force protection intelligence. See the Marine rethinking of the role of SIGINT for force protection.1983 Beirut barracks bombing
Suicide attacks in Beirut cost the lives of 241 American and 58 French soldiers, with many casualties. Often called terrorist attacks, this designation seems to be more a facet of the means of attack, and that it was carried out by non-national actors, than that it was intended to terrorize a civilian population.Further complicating the designation is that there is no consensus on who sponsored the attacks. A US court did find Iran responsible, which would make it an attack by a nation-state on military personnel of two other nation-states. In 2001, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger
Caspar Weinberger
Caspar Willard "Cap" Weinberger , was an American politician, vice president and general counsel of Bechtel Corporation, and Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan from January 21, 1981, until November 23, 1987, making him the third longest-serving defense secretary to date, after...
stated: "But we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn't then."
Rules of engagement
Rules of engagement
Rules of Engagement refers to those responses that are permitted in the employment of military personnel during operations or in the course of their duties. These rules of engagement are determined by the legal framework within which these duties are being carried out...
for the Marines were restrictive; they could not set up what would be considered today a safe perimeter against truck bombs. They carried rifles that had to be loaded before use; there were no heavier weapons that could deflect a truck or destroy its engine.
The Commission termed this a terrorist attack, and raised questions about the intelligence support available to it (emphasis added):
Intelligence provided a good picture of the broad threat facing the USMNF [US multinational force] in Lebanon. Every intelligence agency in the national community and throughout the chain of command disseminated a great amount of analysis and raw data. Key Defense officials and the military chain of command ere alert to, and concerned with, the insights it provided them. There was an awareness of the existing dangerous situation at every level, but no one had specific information on how, where and when the threat would be carried out. Throughout the period of the USMNF presence in Lebanon, intelligence sources were unable to provide proven, accurate, definitive information on terrorist tactics against our forces. This shortcoming held to be the case on October 23, 1983. The terrorist threat was just one among many threats facing the USMNF from the many factions armed with artillery, crew served weapons and small arms....
The USMNF was operating in an urban environment surrounded by hostile forces without any way of pursuing the accuracy of data in order to head off attack. The intelligence structure should be reviewed from both a design and capabilities standpoint. We need to establish ourselves early in a potential trouble spot and find new techniques to isolate and penetrate our potential enemies. Once established, our military forces (and especially ground forces) need to have aggressive, specific intelligence to give the commander the hard information he needs to counter the threats against his force. U.S. intelligence is primarily geared for the support of air and naval forces engaged in nuclear and conventional warfare. Significant attention must be given by the entire U.S. intelligence structure to purging and refining of masses of generalized information into intelligence analysis useful to small unit ground commanders.
1984
In 1984, the CIA both suffered from terrorism directed at it, and also supported anti-Soviet guerillas in Afghanistan that the Soviets considered terrorists.Kidnapping of CIA Beirut station chief and US response authorizing preemption
"NSDD 138 was the next known significant Reagan-era action. It was promulgated after the March 16, 1984 kidnapping of the Central Intelligence Agency's Beirut, Lebanon station chief, William Buckley. This NSDD, much of which remains classified, permitted both the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to form covert operations teams and to use military special operations forces to conduct guerrilla-style war against guerrillas. The NSDD reportedly permits pre-emptive operations, retaliation, expanded intelligence collection, and when necessary, killing of guerrillas in "pre-emptive" self-defense. States that sponsored guerrillas, or what today would generally be lumped under the term terrorists, could be targeted for operations. These included Iran, Libya, Syria, Cuba, North Korea – all identified before Sept. 11, 2001, by the State Department as state-sponsors of terrorism. Nicaragua and the Soviet Union were reportedly also on the list."Creation of al-Qaeda
The network that became known as al-QaedaAl-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...
("The Base") grew out of Arab volunteers who fought the Soviets and their puppet regimes in Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
in the 1980s. In 1984 Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
set up an organization known as the Office of Services in Peshawar
Peshawar
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the administrative center and central economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan....
, Pakistan, to coordinate and finance the "Afghan Arabs
Afghan Arabs
Afghan Arabs were Arab and other Muslim Islamist mujahideen who came to Afghanistan during and following the Soviet-Afghan War to help fellow Muslims fight Soviets and pro-Soviet Afghans....
", as the volunteers became known.
Azzam and Bin Laden set up recruitment offices in the US, under the name "Al-Khifah
Al Kifah Refugee Center
The Al Kifah Refugee Center is a charity that was active in the United Statesand was based in the Faruq Mosque in Brooklyn.-Overview:Al Kifah Refugee Center had clandestine links to forces fighting in Afghanistan dating to the late 1980s, when the fighters enjoyed American support in their struggle...
", the hub of which was the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with nearly 2.6 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated...
's Atlantic Avenue. This was "a place of pivotal importance for Operation Cyclone
Operation Cyclone
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989...
".
Support to the Afghan resistance
The CIA also channeled US aid to Afghan resistance fighters via Pakistan in a covert operation known as Operation CycloneOperation Cyclone
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989...
. It denied dealing with non-Afghan fighters, or having direct contact with bin Laden. However, various authorities relate that the Agency brought both Afghans and Arabs to the United States for military training.
Foundation of the Counterterrorist Center
In the mid 1980s there was a spate of terrorist activity, much of it by Palestinian organizations. In 1986 the CIA founded the Counterterrorist Center, an interdisciplinary body drawing its personnel from the Directorates of Operations, Intelligence, and other US intelligence organizations. It first got to grips with secular terrorism, but found the upcoming Islamist terror much more difficult to penetrate. In the 1990s the latter became a major preoccupation of the center.Afghanistan and its consequences
In the 1980s the CIA covertly supported the Afghan guerrilla struggle against the Soviets, in an operation known as "Operation CycloneOperation Cyclone
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989...
". "Blowback" is a CIA term of art referring to operations, launched against an enemy, which eventually hurt their originators. Various programs, either directly supported by, or known to, US intelligence, were encouraged, in the 1980s, to train combatants for Afghanistan.
Some of this training and preparation took place in the United States. In the case at hand, blowback into the United States may have come from a pipeline, from Brooklyn, New York, to Peshawar
Peshawar
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the administrative center and central economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan....
, Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
, the gateway to joining the Afghan mujahedin. The Brooklyn end was at the Al Kifah Refugee Center
Al Kifah Refugee Center
The Al Kifah Refugee Center is a charity that was active in the United Statesand was based in the Faruq Mosque in Brooklyn.-Overview:Al Kifah Refugee Center had clandestine links to forces fighting in Afghanistan dating to the late 1980s, when the fighters enjoyed American support in their struggle...
, funded under the CIA's Operation Cyclone
Operation Cyclone
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the United States Central Intelligence Agency program to arm, train, and finance the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979 to 1989...
, and the associated Afghan Refugee Service. The Maktab al-Khidamat ("Office of Services") was founded in Peshawar in 1984 by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
to finance and support this effort. "Cold warriors" in the CIA and US State Department looked favorably on these efforts, and considered that they should be formally endorsed and expanded, perhaps along the lines of the international brigades
International Brigades
The International Brigades were military units made up of volunteers from different countries, who traveled to Spain to defend the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939....
of the Spanish Civil War. "Bin Laden actually did some very good things", said Milton Bearden
Milton Bearden
Milton Bearden is a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer, author and film consultant. As of 2003, Bearden lives in Reston, Virginia with his French-born wife, Marie-Catherine....
, chief of the CIA's Islamabad station in the later 1980s. "He put a lot of money in a lot of right places in Afghanistan. He never came on the screen of any Americans as either a terrific asset or someone who was anti-American." The CIA denied, however, actually assisting the "Arab Afghans
Afghan Arabs
Afghan Arabs were Arab and other Muslim Islamist mujahideen who came to Afghanistan during and following the Soviet-Afghan War to help fellow Muslims fight Soviets and pro-Soviet Afghans....
" (as the Arab volunteers became known), or having direct contact with Bin Laden.
Arrested in the US, for the embassy bombings, was a former Egyptian soldier named Ali Mohamed
Ali Mohamed
Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, is a double agent who worked for both the CIA and Egyptian Islamic Jihad simultaneously, reporting on the workings of each for the benefit of the other....
(sometimes called "al-Amriki", the American), who is alleged to have provided training and assistance to Mr Bin Laden's operatives. At that time, however, he was a member of the United States Army Special Forces
United States Army Special Forces
The United States Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets because of their distinctive service headgear, are a special operations force tasked with six primary missions: unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, direct action, hostage rescue, and...
. FBI special agent Jack Cloonan calls him "bin Laden's first trainer". Originally an Egyptian army captain, in the 1980s Mohamed came to the US and became a supply sergeant to the Green Berets in Fort Bragg
Fort Bragg (North Carolina)
Fort Bragg is a major United States Army installation, in Cumberland and Hoke counties, North Carolina, U.S., mostly in Fayetteville but also partly in the town of Spring Lake. It was also a census-designated place in the 2010 census and had a population of 39,457. The fort is named for Confederate...
. At the same time he was involved with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which "merged" with al-Qaeda in the 1990s), and later with Qaeda itself. Mohamed boasted of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had worked for the CIA in the earlier 1980s, but the agency supposedly dropped him after he boasted of his relationship. But Mohamed's behavior led his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, to believe he was still a US intelligence asset. ("I assumed the CIA", said Anderson.) In 1989 Mohamed trained anti-Soviet fighters in his spare time, apparently at the al-Khifah center in Brooklyn. He was "honorably discharged" from the US military in November 1989.
Another individual associated with the Brooklyn center was the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman
Omar Abdel-Rahman
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman , commonly known in the United States as "The Blind Sheikh", is a blind Egyptian Muslim leader who is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Medical Center which is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, United...
, a leading recruiter of mujaheddin, who obtained US entry visas with the help of the CIA in 1987 and 1990.
J. Michael Springmann, head of the non-immigrant visa section at the "CIA-dominated" US consulate in Jeddah
Jeddah
Jeddah, Jiddah, Jidda, or Jedda is a city located on the coast of the Red Sea and is the major urban center of western Saudi Arabia. It is the largest city in Makkah Province, the largest sea port on the Red Sea, and the second largest city in Saudi Arabia after the capital city, Riyadh. The...
, Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...
, in 1987–88, said he learned that the CIA had a "program to bring people to the United States for terrorist training, people recruited by the CIA and its asset Usama bin Laden, and the idea was to get them trained and send them back to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviets." "Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese." These "recruits without backgrounds" were given visas over Springmann's protests.
[T]hose directly recruited by the US ... went to Camp Peary — "the Farm", as the CIA's spy training centre in Virginia is known in the intelligence community ... At the Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills.
Bin Laden's early years: terrorist financier
In about 1988 Bin Laden set up al-Qaeda from the more extreme elements of the Services Office. But it was not a large organization. When Jamal al-FadlJamal al-Fadl
Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl is a Sudanese militant and former associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. Al-Fadl was recruited for the Afghan war through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. In 1988, he joined al Qaeda and took an oath of fealty to Bin Laden...
(who had been recruited through the Brooklyn center in the mid 1980s) joined in 1989, he was described as Qaeda's "third member".
Congressional testimony from then-DCI George Tenet
George Tenet
George John Tenet was the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University....
speaks of knowledge and analysis of Bin Laden, from his early years as a terrorist financier to his leadership of a worldwide network of terrorism based in Afghanistan.
According to Tenet, Bin Laden gained prominence during the Afghan war for his role in financing the recruitment, transportation, and training of Arab nationals who fought alongside the Afghan mujahedin against the Soviets during the 1980s. Tenet denied there had been any US government involvement with him until the early nineties. See Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden
Allegations of CIA assistance to Osama bin Laden
In mid-1979, about the same time as the Soviet Union deployed troops into Afghanistan, the United States began giving several hundred million dollars a year in aid to the Afghan Mujahideen insurgents fighting the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Army in Operation Cyclone...
.
Intelligence and terrorism in the 1990s
The 1990s were characterized by a wide range of terrorist activities, from a religious cult that used WMDs, to an attack on the World Trade Center by an ad hoc jihadist group, to coordinated al-Qaeda attacks.Accounts differ on when the United States recognized bin Laden as an individual financier of terror, as opposed to when al-Qaida was recognized as a group.
In the early 1990s Ali Mohamed
Ali Mohamed
Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, is a double agent who worked for both the CIA and Egyptian Islamic Jihad simultaneously, reporting on the workings of each for the benefit of the other....
, who had been a United States Army Special Forces
United States Army Special Forces
The United States Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets because of their distinctive service headgear, are a special operations force tasked with six primary missions: unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, direct action, hostage rescue, and...
supply sergeant, returned to Afghanistan, where he gave training in al-Qaeda camps. According to FBI special agent Jack Cloonan, in one of Mohamed's first classes were Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
, Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian physician, Islamic theologian and current leader of al-Qaeda. He was previously the second and last "emir" of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, having succeeded Abbud al-Zumar in the latter role when Egyptian authorities sentenced al-Zumar to life...
, and other al-Qaeda leaders. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, he was involved in planning the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa
1990
Eventually, the Services office and Al-Kifah were also linked to Sheikh Omar Abdel-RahmanOmar Abdel-Rahman
Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman , commonly known in the United States as "The Blind Sheikh", is a blind Egyptian Muslim leader who is currently serving a life sentence at the Butner Medical Center which is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, United...
, an Egyptian religious leader later jailed for the planned New York bombings. Even Sheikh Abdel-Rahman had, apparently, entered the US with the full knowledge of the CIA in 1990.
But by the mid-1990s, America's view of Al-Kifah had changed. It discovered that several of those charged with the World Trade Center bombing and the New York landmarks bombings were former Afghan veterans, recruited through the Brooklyn-based organisation. Many of those the US had trained and recruited for a war were still fighting: but now it was against America. A confidential CIA internal survey concluded that it was 'partly culpable' for the World Trade Center bomb, according to reports of the time. There had been blowback.
Jamal al-Fadl
Jamal al-Fadl
Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl is a Sudanese militant and former associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. Al-Fadl was recruited for the Afghan war through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. In 1988, he joined al Qaeda and took an oath of fealty to Bin Laden...
(himself recruited through the Brooklyn center in the mid 1980s) was described as the "third member". Al-Fadl later "defected" to the CIA and provided the agency's Bin Laden unit with a great deal of evidence about al-Qaeda.
1993
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing1993 World Trade Center bombing
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 lb urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to knock the North Tower into the South Tower , bringing...
was a conspiracy, and a group of the conspirators were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. There has been no strong argument that al-Qaeda was involved, although there have been allegations, including by a former Director of Central Intelligence
Director of Central Intelligence
The Office of United States Director of Central Intelligence was the head of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the principal intelligence advisor to the President and the National Security Council, and the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various United...
, that Iraq supported the operational cell. In October 2001 in a PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....
interview, former Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey
R. James Woolsey, Jr.
Robert James Woolsey Jr. is a foreign policy specialist and former Director of Central Intelligence and head of the Central Intelligence Agency .-Early life:...
argued a supposed link between Ramzi Youssef and the Iraqi intelligence services. He suggested the grand jury investigation turned up evidence pointing to Iraq that the Clinton Justice Department "brushed aside."
Neil Herman, who headed the FBI investigation, noted that despite Yasin's presence in Baghdad, there was no evidence of Iraqi support for the attack. "We looked at that rather extensively," he told CNN terrorism analyst Peter L. Bergen. "There were no ties to the Iraqi government." Bergen writes, "In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack."
Claims that Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...
was behind the bombing are based on the research of Laurie Mylroie
Laurie Mylroie
Laurie Mylroie is a U.S. author who has written several controversial and heavily criticized books on the subject of Iraq and the War on Terror. Notably, Mylroie contends that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein sponsored the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and many subsequent terrorist...
of the conservative American Enterprise Institute
American Enterprise Institute
The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research is a conservative think tank founded in 1943. Its stated mission is "to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism—limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and...
.
1995
Only a brief mention of Colombian FARC activity is mentioned in the declassified part of the 1995 Terrorism Review.March 1995 actions by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo
Aum Shinrikyo
Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese new religious movement. The group was founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. The group gained international notoriety in 1995, when it carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway....
demonstrated that the use of WMD is no longer restricted to the battlefield. Japanese authorities have determined that the Aum was working on developing the chemical nerve agents sarin and VX. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which attacked Japanese civilians with deadly gas just one year ago (March 20, 1995) also tried to mine its own uranium in Australia and to buy Russian nuclear warheads.
1996
The attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia , commonly known in British English as Saudi Arabia and in Arabic as as-Sa‘ūdiyyah , is the largest state in Western Asia by land area, constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and the second-largest in the Arab World...
is the only declassified subject in the 1996 Terrorism Review Responsibility for the attack was, at the time of publication of the Review, not determined.
Bin Ladin came to the attention of the CIA as an emerging terrorist threat during his stay in Sudan from 1991 to 1996.
The Agency, however, began to be concerned than bin Laden would extend his activities beyond Afghanistan. It experimented with various internal organizations that could focus on subjects such as bin Laden specifically and al-Qaeda generally.
In 1996 an experimental "virtual station" was launched, modeled on the agency's geographically-based stations, but based in Washington and dedicated to a particular transnational issue. It was placed under the Counterterrorist Center
Counterterrorist Center
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center was established in 1986. It is not to be confused with the National Counterterrorism Center, a separate entity.-Foundation and early years:...
(CTC), and, like the CTC, cut across disciplines and drew its personnel from widely across the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Michael Scheuer
Michael Scheuer
Michael F. Scheuer is a former CIA intelligence officer, American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst. He is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies...
, who up to then headed the Center's Islamic extremist branch, was asked to run it. Scheuer, who had noticed a stream of intelligence reports about Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...
, suggested the station be dedicated to this particular individual. The station began to produce evidence that Bin Laden was not only a financier, but also an organizer of terror. Originally dubbed "Terrorist Financial Links" (TFL), the unit soon became rechristened the Bin Laden Issue Station
Bin Laden Issue Station
The Bin Laden Issue Station was a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden.Soon after its creation the Station developed a new, deadlier vision of bin Laden's activities. In 1999 the CIA inaugurated a grand "Plan" against al-Qaeda, but struggled to find the...
.
Jamal al-Fadl
Jamal al-Fadl
Jamal Ahmed Mohamed al-Fadl is a Sudanese militant and former associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s. Al-Fadl was recruited for the Afghan war through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. In 1988, he joined al Qaeda and took an oath of fealty to Bin Laden...
, who defected to the CIA in spring 1996, began to provide the Station with a new image of the Qaeda leader: he was not only a terrorist financier, but a terrorist organizer too, and sought weapons of mass destruction. FBI special agent Dan Coleman (who together with his partner Jack Cloonan had been "seconded" to the Bin Laden Station) called him Qaeda's "Rosetta Stone
Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appears in three scripts: the upper text is Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the middle portion Demotic script, and the lowest Ancient Greek...
".
1998
On August 7, 1998, near simultaneous car bomb attacks struck US embassies, and local buildings, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks, linked to local members of the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden, brought bin Laden and al Qaeda to international attention for the first time, and resulted in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation placing bin Laden on its Ten Most Wanted list.The declassified page of the 1998 Terrorism Review speaks of the release of hostages by Colombia's two major guerilla organizations, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). Kidnapping is the only threat mentioned, with a warning of continued danger to US interests.
The Review makes no mention of other countries or threats, but only the cover and one page were even partially declassified.
1999
In 1999 DCI George TenetGeorge Tenet
George John Tenet was the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University....
launched a grand "Plan" to deal with al-Qaeda. In preparation, he selected new leadership for the Counterterrorist Center
Counterterrorist Center
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center was established in 1986. It is not to be confused with the National Counterterrorism Center, a separate entity.-Foundation and early years:...
(CTC). He placed Cofer Black
Cofer Black
Joseph Cofer Black is an American counter-terrorism expert and consultant. He had a 28-year career in the Directorate of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, culminating in his appointment as Director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center in June 1999...
in charge of the CTC, and "Rich B" (a "top-flight executive" from Tenet's own leadership group) in charge of the CTC's Bin Laden unit
Bin Laden Issue Station
The Bin Laden Issue Station was a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden.Soon after its creation the Station developed a new, deadlier vision of bin Laden's activities. In 1999 the CIA inaugurated a grand "Plan" against al-Qaeda, but struggled to find the...
. Tenet assigned the CTC to develop the Plan. The proposals, brought out in September, sought to penetrate Qaeda's "Afghan sanctuary" with US and Afghan agents, in order to obtain information on and mount operations against Bin Laden's network. In October, officers from the Bin Laden unit visited northern Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
. Once the Plan was finalized, the Agency created a "Qaeda cell" (whose functions overlapped those of the CTC's Bin Laden unit
Bin Laden Issue Station
The Bin Laden Issue Station was a unit of the Central Intelligence Agency dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden.Soon after its creation the Station developed a new, deadlier vision of bin Laden's activities. In 1999 the CIA inaugurated a grand "Plan" against al-Qaeda, but struggled to find the...
) to give operational leadership to the effort. CIA intelligence chief Charles E. Allen
Charles E. Allen
Charles E. Allen is an American public servant, notable for his roles at the United States Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis and, before that, the Central Intelligence Agency.-Department of Homeland Security:...
to set up a "Qaeda cell" was put in charge of the tactical execution of the Plan. i
The CIA concentrated its inadequate financial resources on the Plan, so that at least some of its more modest aspirations were realized. Intelligence collection efforts on bin Laden and al-Qaeda increased significantly from 1999. "By 9/11", said Tenet, "a map would show that these collection programs and human [reporting] networks were in place in such numbers as to nearly cover Afghanistan". (But this excluded Bin Laden's inner circle itself.)
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....
A heavily redacted CIA document, the 1999 Terrorism Review, reveals concern with Libyan support of terrorism, through its External Security Organization (ESO).
The ESO is described as responsible for surveillance, assassination, and kidnapping of Libyan dissidents outside the country; examples were given from actions in the United Kingdom and Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
. Libya was also described as attempting to build influence in sub-Saharan Africa, supporting a range of Palestinian rejectionist groups, and giving funds and equipment to the Moro Islamic Liberation Organization and Abu Sayyaf
Abu Sayyaf
Abu Sayyaf also known as al-Harakat al-Islamiyya is one of several military Islamist separatist groups based in and around the southern Philippines, in Bangsamoro where for almost 30 years various Muslim groups have been engaged in an insurgency for an independent province in the country...
Group in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
.
In addition, the World Anti-Imperialist Center (Mahatba) and the World Islamic Call Society (WICS) were described as part of terrorist infrastructure. This review does not mention any country, other than Libya, or non-national actor as a sponsor of terrorism, as opposed to an operational terrorist group.
Intelligence and terrorism in the 2000s
In late 2000 Tenet, recognizing the deficiency of "big-picture" analysis of al-Qaeda, appointed a senior manager in the Counterterrorist CenterCounterterrorist Center
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center was established in 1986. It is not to be confused with the National Counterterrorism Center, a separate entity.-Foundation and early years:...
to investigate "creating a strategic assessment capability". This led to the creation of the Strategic Assessments Branch
Strategic Assessments Branch
The strategic assessments branch of the Counterterrorist Center of the United States Central Intelligence Agency was established in 2001 to plug a gap in strategic analysis of the terrorism threat, particularly that due to al-Qaeda....
in 2001.
2000
On October 12, 2000 three suicide bombers detonated a skiff packed with explosives alongside the American Arleigh Burke-class destroyerDestroyer
In naval terminology, a destroyer is a fast and maneuverable yet long-endurance warship intended to escort larger vessels in a fleet, convoy or battle group and defend them against smaller, powerful, short-range attackers. Destroyers, originally called torpedo-boat destroyers in 1892, evolved from...
, the USS Cole
USS Cole (DDG-67)
The second USS Cole is an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyer homeported in NS Norfolk, Virginia. The Cole is named in honor of Marine Sergeant Darrell S. Cole, a machine-gunner killed in action on Iwo Jima on 19 February 1945, during World War II...
, which was docked in Aden
Aden
Aden is a seaport city in Yemen, located by the eastern approach to the Red Sea , some 170 kilometres east of Bab-el-Mandeb. Its population is approximately 800,000. Aden's ancient, natural harbour lies in the crater of an extinct volcano which now forms a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a...
Harbor, Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....
. The blast blew a hole 20 feet (6.1 m) high and 40 feet (12.2 m) wide in the ship's hull, killed 17 of the ship's crew and injured 30. "With just slightly more skilled execution, CIA analysts later concluded, the bombers would have killed three hundred and sent the destroyer to the bottom." See USS Cole bombing
USS Cole bombing
The USS Cole Bombing, or the USS Cole Incident, was a suicide attack against the United States Navy destroyer on October 12, 2000 while it was harbored and refueled in the Yemeni port of Aden. Seventeen American sailors were killed, and 39 were injured...
for details of the attack and response to it.
The attack on the USS Cole apparently came out of the blue. However Kie Fallis at the Defense Intelligence Agency
Defense Intelligence Agency
The Defense Intelligence Agency is a member of the Intelligence Community of the United States, and is the central producer and manager of military intelligence for the United States Department of Defense, employing over 16,500 U.S. military and civilian employees worldwide...
, from "data mining and analysis", had "predicted" in early autumn 2000 a Qaeda attack by an explosives-laden small boat against a US warship. And in late September 2000 the DIA experimental data-mining operation Able Danger
Able Danger
Able Danger was a classified military planning effort led by the U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency...
had uncovered information of increased Qaeda "activity" in Aden
Aden
Aden is a seaport city in Yemen, located by the eastern approach to the Red Sea , some 170 kilometres east of Bab-el-Mandeb. Its population is approximately 800,000. Aden's ancient, natural harbour lies in the crater of an extinct volcano which now forms a peninsula, joined to the mainland by a...
Harbor, Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....
. 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".
Clandestine intelligence/covert action
In 2000 the CIA and USAF jointly ran a series of flights over Afghanistan with a small remote-controlled reconnaissance drone, the Predator; they obtained probable photos of Bin Laden. Cofer BlackCofer Black
Joseph Cofer Black is an American counter-terrorism expert and consultant. He had a 28-year career in the Directorate of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency, culminating in his appointment as Director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center in June 1999...
and others became advocates of arming the Predator with missiles to try to assassinate Bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders.
Paramilitary support
In the spring of 2001, CIA officers evaluated the forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud
Ahmed Shah Massoud
Ahmad Shah Massoud was a Kabul University engineering student turned military leader who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, earning him the name Lion of Panjshir. His followers call him Āmir Sāhib-e Shahīd...
, and found his strength less than the previous fall. While the officers gave him cash and supplies, and received intelligence on the Taliban, they did not have the authority to build back his fighting strength against the Taliban.
Targeted killing in war versus assassination
While the US has had a series of Presidential Executive Orders banning assassinations, none of those Orders actually defined assassination. Using dictionary rather than statutory definition, a common definition is "murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
by surprise for political purposes". Jeffrey Addicott argues that if murder is generally accepted as an illegal act in US and international law, so if assassination is a form of murder, the Orders cannot be making legal something that is already illegal.
The Hague and Geneva Conventions did not consider non-national actors as belligerents in general war. The Conventions do consider spontaneous rising against invasion and civil war as having lawful combatants, but there are much more restrictions of the status, as legal combatants, of fighters who came to a war from an external country. This discussion will not address the controversial issue of illegal combatants, but, following Addicott's reasoning, assumes that violence, in defense to an attack, is legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
Note that before the attackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
were identified, the US invoked the NATO treaty, without objection, as a member state that had been attacked. "In the War on Terror, it is beyond legal dispute that the virtual-State al-Qa’eda terrorists are aggressors and that the United States is engaging in self-defense when using violence against them."
Black and others became advocates of arming the Predator with AGM-114 Hellfire
AGM-114 Hellfire
The AGM-114 Hellfire is an air-to-surface missile developed primarily for anti-armor use. It has multi-mission, multi-target precision-strike capability, and can be launched from multiple air, sea, and ground platforms. The Hellfire missile is the primary 100 lb-class air-to-ground precision...
missiles to try to kill Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. But there were both legal and technical issues. Tenet in particular was concerned about the CIA moving back into the business of targeted killing. And a series of live-fire tests in the Nevada Desert in summer 2001 produced mixed results.
In June 2001, at a test site in Nevada in the US, CIA and Air Force personnel built a replica of Bin Laden's villa in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Predator controllers tested aiming and firing a Predator missile at the house, and post-strike analysis showed it would have killed anyone in the targeted room. The significance of this demonstration was called a "holy grail" by one participant. A weapon now existed which, at long range, could kill Bin Laden shortly after finding him. Practice runs proved reliable, but, according to the Washington Post, the Bush Administration refrained from such action. On September 4, a new set of directives called for increasing pressure against the Taliban until they either ejected al-Qaeda or faced a serious threat to their continued power. No decision on using this capability had reached President Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
by September 11.
Tenet advised cautiously at the Cabinet-level Principals Committee on September 4, 2001. If the Cabinet wanted to empower the CIA to field a lethal drone, he said, "they should do so with their eyes wide open, fully aware of the potential fallout if there were a controversial or mistaken strike". National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
Condoleezza Rice
Condoleezza Rice is an American political scientist and diplomat. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush...
concluded that the armed Predator was required, but evidently not ready. She advised the CIA to consider re-starting reconnaissance flights. The "previously reluctant" Tenet then ordered the Agency to do so. The CIA was authorized to "deploy the system with weapons-capable aircraft".
Strategic Assessments Branch
The Counterterrorist CenterCounterterrorist Center
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center was established in 1986. It is not to be confused with the National Counterterrorism Center, a separate entity.-Foundation and early years:...
, which Tenet had assigned to advise on setting up a strategic assessment capability, reported back in March. "In [an] early Spring 2001 briefing to the DCI, [the] CTC requested hiring a small group of contractors not involved in day-to-day crises to digest vast quantities of information and develop targeting strategies. The briefing emphasized that the unit needed people, not money."
The Strategic Assessments Branch
Strategic Assessments Branch
The strategic assessments branch of the Counterterrorist Center of the United States Central Intelligence Agency was established in 2001 to plug a gap in strategic analysis of the terrorism threat, particularly that due to al-Qaeda....
of the Counterterrorist Center was formally set up in July. But it struggled to find personnel. The branch's chief reported for duty on September 10, 2001.
World-Wide Attack Matrix
After 9/11, the CIA came under criticism for not having done enough to prevent the attacks. DCI George TenetGeorge Tenet
George John Tenet was the Director of Central Intelligence for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and is Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University....
rejected the criticism, citing the Agency's planning efforts especially over the preceding two years. His response came in a briefing held on September 15, 2001, where he presented the Worldwide Attack Matrix
Worldwide Attack Matrix
The Worldwide Attack Matrix is a document describing covert counter-terrorism operations in 80 countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa created in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It was presented by Central Intelligence Agency director George J. Tenet in a briefing held...
, a classified document describing covert CIA anti-terror operations in eighty countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The actions, underway or being recommended, would range from "routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks." The plans, if carried out, "would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history."
Tenet said that the CIA's efforts had put the Agency in a position to respond rapidly and effectively to the attacks, both in the "Afghan sanctuary" and in "ninety-two countries around the world".
At the Cabinet-level Principals Committee meeting on terrorism of September 4, 2001, Tenet warned of the dangers of a controversial or mistaken strike with an under-tested armed drone. After the meeting, the CIA resumed reconnaissance flights, the drones now being weapons-capable but as yet unarmed.
2002
Starting on September 11, the strategy was no longer steady escalation, but multiple attacks on multiple fronts. On 5 November 2002, newspapers reported that Al-QaedaAl-Qaeda
Al-Qaeda is a global broad-based militant Islamist terrorist organization founded by Osama bin Laden sometime between August 1988 and late 1989. It operates as a network comprising both a multinational, stateless army and a radical Sunni Muslim movement calling for global Jihad...
operatives in a car travelling through Yemen
Yemen
The Republic of Yemen , commonly known as Yemen , is a country located in the Middle East, occupying the southwestern to southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the north, the Red Sea to the west, and Oman to the east....
had been killed by a missile launched from a CIA-controlled Predator drone
RQ-1 Predator
The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator is an unmanned aerial vehicle used primarily by the United States Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency...
(a medium-altitude, remote-controlled aircraft).
In 2004, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC-TV) international affairs program "Foreign Correspondent" investigated this targeted killing and the involvement of then U.S. Ambassador as part of a special report titled "The Yemen Option". The report also examined the evolving tactics and countermeasures in dealing with Al Qaeda inspired attacks. Transcript at: http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2004/s1054112.htm
2004
In June 2004, the U.S. killed Nek Muhammad WazirNek Muhammad Wazir
Nek Muhammad Wazir was a charismatic Pashtun military leader.He was killed in a US drone strike in South Waziristan, FATA, Pakistan in June, 2004...
, a Taliban commander and al-Qaeda facilitator, in an apparent Predator missile strike in South Waziristan
South Waziristan
South Waziristan is the southern part of Waziristan, a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan and covering some 11,585 km² . Waziristan comprises the area west and southwest of Peshawar between the Tochi River to the north and the Gomal River to the south, forming...
.
2005
On May 15, 2005, it was reported that another of these drones had been used to assassinate Al-Qaeda explosives expert Haitham al-YemeniHaitham al-Yemeni
Haitham al-Yemeni was an al Qaeda explosives expert from Yemen. He was killed in North Waziristan, northwest Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, in early March 2005 in a drone attack by an unmanned CIA-operated RQ-1 Predator aircraft...
inside Pakistan
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
.
In December 2005, Abu Hamza Rabia
Abu Hamza Rabia
Abu Hamza Rabia was an Egyptian member of al-Qaeda, described in news accounts as a high-ranking leader within the organization's hierarchy. His death, in a surprise drone attack, was widely reported by media outlets around the world.According to American intelligence officials, Rabia was...
, an Egyptian who was reportedly al-Qaeda's third in command, was killed in a surprise drone attack in North Waziristan.
2006
Damadola airstrike
On 13 January 2006 the Central Intelligence Agency fired missiles into the Pakistani village of Damadola in the Bajaur tribal area, about seven kilometres from the Afghan border, killing at least 18 people. Originally the Bajaur tribal area government claimed that at least four foreign members...
, a Pakistani village near the Afghan border, where they believed Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman al-Zawahiri
Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri is an Egyptian physician, Islamic theologian and current leader of al-Qaeda. He was previously the second and last "emir" of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, having succeeded Abbud al-Zumar in the latter role when Egyptian authorities sentenced al-Zumar to life...
was located. The airstrike killed a number of civilians but al-Zawahiri apparently was not among them. The Pakistani government issued a protest against the US attack, which it considered violated its sovereignty.
2008
n January 2008, Abu Laith al-LibiAbu Laith al-Libi
Abu Laith al-Libi was a senior leader of the al-Qaeda movement in Afghanistan who appeared in several al-Qaeda videos. He was believed to have been active in the tribal regions of Waziristan. He also served as an al Qaeda spokesman...
, one al-Qaeda's senior figures, was killed in a targeted killing Predator rocket attack in Pakistan. Some intelligence sources describe him as the number three leader of al-Qaeda.
In July 2008, Abu Khabab al-Masri, suspected leader of al-Qaeda's chemical and biological weapons efforts, was killed in an attack by U.S. drone-launched missiles on a house in South Waziristan in Pakistan.
In October 2008, Khalid Habib
Khalid Habib
Khalid Habib was an ascending member of al-Qaeda's central structure in Pakistan and Afghanistan. His nationality has been reported as Egyptian and as Moroccan ....
, al-Qaeda regional operations commander in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was killed by a missile launched by a Predator in South Waziristan, Pakistan.
In November 2008, Rashid Rauf
Rashid Rauf
Rashid Rauf was an alleged Al-Qaeda operative. He was a dual citizen of Britain and Pakistan who was arrested in Bhawalpur, Pakistan in connection with the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot in August 2006, a day before some arrests were made in Britain...
, British/Pakistani suspected planner of a 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot
2006 transatlantic aircraft plot
The 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot was a terrorist plot to detonate liquid explosives carried on board at least 10 airliners travelling from the United Kingdom to the United States and Canada...
, was killed by a missile launched from a U.S. drone in North Waziristan.
2009
Usama Al-Kini
Usama Al Kini — or Osama al-Kini — was a citizen of Kenya believed to have held a senior leadership role in Al Qaeda.According to a United States military spokesmen, Al-Kini was the head of Al Qaeda's operations in Pakistan. Al-Kini was on the FBI's most wanted list...
and Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan
Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan
Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan was a fugitive wanted in the United States as a participant in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings. He was alleged to have purchased the Toyota and Nissan trucks used in the attacks, flying out of Nairobi to Karachi, Pakistan five days before the assault was launched...
, alleged orchestrators of the 1998 United States embassy bombings
1998 United States embassy bombings
The 1998 United States embassy bombings were a series of attacks that occurred on August 7, 1998, in which hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous truck bomb explosions at the United States embassies in the East African capitals of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya. The date of the...
in Kenya
Kenya
Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...
and Tanzania
Tanzania
The United Republic of Tanzania is a country in East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.Tanzania is a state...
, were killed in a Predator strike in northern Pakistan.
In August 2009, Baitullah Mehsud
Baitullah Mehsud
Baitullah Mehsud was a leading militant in Waziristan, Pakistan, and the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan . He formed the TTP from an alliance of about five militant groups in December 2007. He is thought by U.S...
, leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan
Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan , alternatively referred to as the Pakistani Taliban, is an umbrella organization of various Islamist militant groups based in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border in Pakistan. Most, but not all, Pakistani Taliban groups coalesce under the TTP...
(TTP), was killed in a U.S. drone missile attack in Waziristan.
Forward Operating Base Chapman attack
On December 30, 2009, a suicide attack occurred at Forward Operating Base Chapman, a major CIA base in the province of KhostKhost
Khost or Khowst is a city in eastern Afghanistan. It is the capital of Khost province, which is a mountainous region near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan...
, Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
. Eight people, among them at least six CIA officers, including the chief of the base, were killed and six others seriously wounded in the attack. The attack was the second most deadliest carried out against the CIA, after the 1983 United States Embassy bombing
1983 United States Embassy bombing
The 1983 U.S. embassy bombing was a suicide bombing against the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon on April 18, 1983 that killed over 60 people, mostly embassy staff members and United States Marines and sailors. It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission up to that time, and is...
in Beirut, Lebanon, and was a major setback for the intelligence agency's operations.