Thwarted Plots

Ronald Kessler. The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack. Crown Forum. 272 pages. $26.95

In the years since 9/11, as elections have come and gone and come again, as  the war in Iraq has raged and calmed, and even as congressmen have summoned government officials before their committees to testify on torture and wiretapping, one crucial fact seems occasionally to have been lost in the shuffle: That the United States is engaged, at home and abroad, through military and other means, in battle with an enemy with a murderous ideology that is intent on our destruction. The urgency the vast majority of Americans felt in fending off this threat after 9/11 seems to have evaporated. The issue of an imminent threat of terrorist attack has all but dropped from the public discourse, gaining only passing mention from media outlets with a desire to criticize policies or officials of the Bush administration.

Ronald Kessler’s The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack serves as a reminder of just how engaged we actually are in this struggle, and the lengths to which we must go to win. It lays out the prominent and often daring and self-sacrificing role the intelligence community has assumed in fighting the global war on terror. It also documents the wholesale changes to that community’s basic functioning that have been implemented since 9/11. And it shows how successful the U.S. has been in fighting this war in the face of domestic opposition from the left, obfuscation by the mainstream media, and the dogged persistence of the terrorists themselves in their efforts to attack again. Kessler’s book launches a defense of George W. Bush’s vision of the post-9/11 world, as well as of the policies that vision engendered.

Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter and author of16 books (nine specifically about the intelligence community), was granted unparalleled access to intelligence officials, and it is their stories that he relates. He does so in a refreshingly matter-of-fact and understated style that seems to have been abandoned by many who cover the war on terror. In short, he is a veteran reporter who reports, letting his sources tell the tale.

The book opens to a familiar scene: President George W. Bush in Florida on September 11, 2001. He receives his daily intelligence briefing, then heads to a photo-op at an elementary school. But here the scene changes. Kessler doesn’t stick with Bush, but rather follows the man who briefed him, cia Associate Deputy Director Michael Morrell. We learn from Morrell of the scramble back to Air Force One, and that by the time the president’s plane reached Omaha a few hours later, the cia had already linked three of the hijackers to al Qaeda. It is through the eyes of intelligence officials that the story unfolds, and this inside perspective informs the narrative from start to finish.

From interviews with fbi Director Robert Mueller and then-Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card to lesser-known figures like fbi agents Pat D’Amuro and Art Cummings, Kessler relates the story of a sea change in the philosophy and practice of intelligence work. Prior to 9/11, the fbi focused primarily on building cases for prosecution, compiling enough evidence on a subject for an indictment. After 9/11, at the direction of the president, the fbi’s priority shifted from prosecution to prevention. Bush’s vision of a global war on terror, his belief that the terrorists were already at war with us, required a new approach. As Art Cummings tells Kessler of pre-9/11 days:

[W]e ran on the assumption that if you had an indictment, you used the indictment. Slap it down on the table, pick the guy up, you throw him on an airplane. You bring him home, you put him in jail, and you go, “Okay, I’ve done a great job today.”

If his agents took such an attitude today, he adds, he would tell them that “they basically just put Americans more in jeopardy rather than less in jeopardy.” Furthermore, thanks to a Justice Department decision regarding warrants obtained under provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (fisa), any intelligence the fbi did gather was kept secret from agents engaged in criminal investigation, and vice versa, even if those agents were investigating the same person. The fisa decision had the added effect of completely cutting off communication between the fbi and other intelligence agencies (cia, dia, nsa). This wall finally began to fall with the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, and came down completely with the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004.

This shift in priorities and the removal of the wall between investigation and intelligence gathering was accompanied by a long-overdue transformation of the Bureau’s information technology. After 9/11, the fbi was overwhelmed by information, which brought to light just how backward-looking the Bureau had been with regard to computers and the internet. An aide to Louis Freeh, Mueller’s predecessor, reveals that Freeh never even turned on his computer. And Kessler provides an astonishing list of the Bureau’s myriad other technological deficiencies: ancient 386 computers; a nonfunctional electronic filing system for casework; an inadequate email system; the use of fax machines that often sent duplicate and triplicate copies, sending two or three teams out to chase the same lead. Mueller, unlike Freeh, was not averse to new technologies. He began the slow process of bringing the fbi into the twenty-first century, ordering thousands of new computers, instituting a web-based system to track orders issued by the fbi for phone, email, and internet search records, and initiating the development of a virtual case file system. (This is not yet complete, but even the stop-gap system now in place saves thousands of hours of research, in contrast to the makeshift data-basing the fbi used before 2002.)

Though these failures have been well documented, it is still shocking to see them all laid out here, and  equally so to be reminded of the steady stream of political and journalistic efforts to discredit and compromise not simply the Bush administration’s agenda, but also the work being done by the American intelligence community in its effort to prevent another attack.

The aclu’s campaign against the Patriot Act is a case in point. Kessler devotes a whole chapter to the aclu’s objections to the fbi’s access to library records and meets each overblown argument with a quiet certitude, fully supported by his command of the facts:

“The fbi . . . is all over the library threat, seizing library records at will under the Patriot Act,” Naomi Klein wrote in the Nation. . . . Five years after the enactment of the Patriot Act, the number of searches of charge-out or computer records conducted at libraries under the business records provision of the new act was one.

To the aclu’s claim, in response to this single request for information, that “Such open-ended fishing expeditions expose all library users to the search and seizure of their records and to the invasion of their privacy,” Kessler responds:

In fact, the fbi had used what is called a national security letter to try and find out who had sent a detailed, threatening email to a government agency from one of the Library Connections computers. The fbi was not interested in anyone’s reading habits or general internet usage, as the aclu claimed. Rather, it wanted to nab the person who had sent the anonymous email before he killed hundreds of people. Moreover, because it knew which computer had originated the email, the fbi only wanted transmission data for that one computer during a forty-five minute period on the day the email had been sent.

But beyond the openly avowed efforts of civil liberties activists and left-wing publications to undermine the administration’s anti-terror program, there is the question of the mainstream media.  In about as heated a denunciation as Kessler offers in the book, he draws on his own journalistic experience to illuminate how irresponsible the media have become:

Under the journalistic standards that prevailed during the Watergate years, editors at responsible media outlets insisted that any fact that undercuts the lead of a story appear no later than the second paragraph. Reporters who tried to skew their stories to sensationalize them or distort or suppress the truth found themselves looking for jobs. . . . All that has changed. Under the current journalistic standards, it has become not only acceptable but routine practice to bury mitigating facts near the end of a story to give it greater spin — or to omit the other side entirely.

Kessler cites example after example of mainstream media outlets, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, sensationalizing headlines and stories to give the appearance of civil-liberties abuses by the federal government. In November 2005 the Washington Post ran a story headlined “The fbi’s Secret Scrutiny.” The story, Kessler reports, “claimed the fbi issues 30,000 national security letters a year, allowing the bureau to ‘sweep up the records of many people’ and ‘extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence, and financial lives of ordinary Americans.’” Yet, he continues:

Despite the chilling language of the article, national security letters are similar to grand jury subpoenas, which are normally issued at the direction of a prosecutor and allow the fbi to obtain records of calls, e-mails, and searches of the web in criminal investigations. National security letters are issued in international terrorism and espionage investigations. They do not allow the fbi to wiretap or to see the contents of e-mails. In contrast to grand jury subpoenas, compliance is not required.

Even worse, Kessler reminds us, publications have run stories over the years that have actually impeded the intelligence community’s ability to gather intelligence. For example, after the New York Times exposed the program the cia had been using to monitor international financial transactions, al Qaeda operatives stopped using such transactions. Also, shockingly, a Washington Post story in 1998 revealed that the U.S. was intercepting Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone calls. A few days after the story ran, bin Laden stopped using the phone.

Yet, in the face of all this, the U.S. intelligence community has not only made great strides in correcting pre-9/11 deficiencies, it has also had many successes in defending us against the terrorist threat. Kessler details cooperative efforts among domestic and foreign intelligence agencies to bring in terrorists and bring down terrorist plots, including the captures of al Qaeda field commander Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheik Mohammed, among others. He also tells the story of the successful thwarting of a massive operation to blow up ten British airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. “By the end of 2002,” he reports, “fbi Director Mueller could point to about a hundred terrorist attacks that had been thwarted by the U.S. government since 9/11, including some intended to take place on U.S. soil.”

The stories of these successes are the stories of piecing one bit of information with another and monitoring subjects for months. Of balancing the interests of getting a dangerous subject off the street against the value of keeping him on the street to collect more information. Of coercive interrogations, and flattering a murderer to gain his trust.¹ Of information sharing, international cooperation, and the application of tremendous new technologies. They are stories of intelligence work and the dedication of the people doing it. However distracted and complacent their fellow citizens have become in the years since 9/11, they are convinced of the need to go on working to keep this country safe and free. And The Terrorist Watch is a matter-of-fact rebuke to those who believe that the war on terror is over, those who believe it never really existed, and those who simply believe it is not worth fighting.