gunrunners and to Islamic radicals in Brooklyn, who were in turn behind the World Trade Center bombing two and a half years later, which was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who then showed up in Manila in 1994, apparently plotting to kill the pope, crash a plane into the Pentagon or the CIA, and bomb as many as twelve transcontinental airliners simultaneously. And who was Yousef associating with in the Philippines? Mohammed Khalifa, Wali Khan Amin-Shah, and Ibrahim Munir, all of whom had fought alongside, pledged a loyalty oath to, or worked for a shadowy Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.
Miller was a network-television correspondent throughout much of the past decade, and the best parts of The Cell recount his own experiences in covering the terrorist story. He is an extraordinary reporter. At the time of the first World Trade Center attack, in February of 1993, he clapped a flashing light on the dashboard of his car and followed the wave of emergency vehicles downtown. (At the bombing site, he was continuously trailed by a knot of reporters—I was one of them—who had concluded that the best way to learn what was going on was to try to overhear his conversations.) Miller became friends with the FBI agents who headed the New York counterterrorist office—Neil Herman and John O’Neill, in particular—and he became as obsessed with Al Qaeda as they were. He was in Yemen, with the FBI, after Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole. In 1998, at the Marriott in Islamabad, he and his cameraman met someone known to them only as Akhtar, who spirited them across the border into the hills of Afghanistan to interview Osama bin Laden. In The Cell, the period from 1990 through September 11 becomes a seamless, devastating narrative: the evolution of Al Qaeda. “How did this happen to us?” the book asks in its opening pages. The answer, the authors argue, can be found by following the “thread” connecting Kahane’s murder to September 11. In the events of the past decade, they declare, there is a clear “recurring pattern.”
The same argument is made by Senator Richard Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in his investigative report on September 11, released this past December. The report is a lucid and powerful document, in which Shelby painstakingly points out all the missed or misinterpreted signals pointing to a major terrorist attack. The CIA knew that two suspected Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had entered the country, but the CIA didn’t tell the FBI or the NSC. An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to headquarters that began with the sentence “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama Bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges.” But the FBI never acted on the information, and failed to connect it with reports that terrorists were interested in using airplanes as weapons. The FBI took into custody the suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, on account of his suspicious behavior at flight school, but was unable to integrate his case into a larger picture of terrorist behavior. “The most fundamental problem… is our Intelligence Community’s inability to ‘connect the dots’ available to it before September 11, 2001, about terrorists’ interest in attacking symbolic American targets,” the Shelby report states. The phrase “connect the dots” appears so often in the report that it becomes a kind of mantra. There was a pattern, as plain as day in retrospect, yet the vaunted American intelligence community simply could not see it.
None of these postmortems, however, answer the question raised by the Yom Kippur War: was this pattern obvious before the attack? This question—whether we revise our judgment of events after the fact—is something that psychologists have paid a great deal of attention to. For example, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff asked a group of people to estimate the probability of a series of possible outcomes of the trip. What were the chances that the trip would lead to permanent diplomatic relations between China and the United States? That Nixon would meet with the leader of China, Mao Tse-tung, at least once? That Nixon would call the trip a success? As it turned out, the trip was a diplomatic triumph, and Fischhoff then went back to the same people and asked them to recall what their estimates of the different outcomes of the visit had been. He found that the subjects now, overwhelmingly, “remembered” being more optimistic than they had actually been. If you originally thought that it was unlikely that Nixon would meet with Mao, afterward, when the press was full of accounts of Nixon’s meeting with Mao, you’d “remember” that you had thought the chances of a meeting were pretty good. Fischhoff calls this phenomenon “creeping determinism”—the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable—and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, “The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.”
To read the Shelby report, or the seamless narrative from Nosair to bin Laden in The Cell, is to be convinced that if the CIA and the FBI had simply been able to connect the dots, what happened on September 11 should not have been a surprise at all. Is this a fair criticism or is it just a case of creeping determinism?
On August 7, 1998, two Al Qaeda terrorists detonated a cargo truck filled with explosives outside the US embassy in Nairobi, killing 213 people and injuring more than four thousand. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell see the Kenyan embassy bombing as a textbook example of intelligence failure. The CIA, they tell us, had identified an Al Qaeda cell in Kenya well before the attack, and its members were under surveillance. They had an eight-page letter, written by an Al Qaeda operative, speaking of the imminent arrival of “engineers”—the code word for bomb makers—in Nairobi. The US ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, had begged Washington for more security. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and legislator says that the Kenyan intelligence service warned US intelligence about the plot several months before August 7, and in November of 1997 a man named Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, who worked for one of Osama bin Laden’s companies, walked into the US embassy in Nairobi and told American intelligence of a plot to blow up the building. What did our officials do? They forced the leader of the Kenyan cell—a US citizen—to return home, and then abruptly halted their surveillance of the group. They ignored the eight-page letter. They allegedly showed the Kenyan intelligence service’s warning to the Mossad, which dismissed it, and after questioning Ahmed, they decided that he wasn’t credible. After the bombing, The Cell tells us, a senior State Department official phoned Bushnell and asked, “How could this have happened?”
“For the first time since the blast,” Miller, Stone, and Mitchell write, “Bushnell’s horror turned to anger. There was too much history. ‘I wrote you a letter,’ she said.”
This is all very damning, but doesn’t it fall into the creeping-determinism trap? It is not at all clear that it passes the creeping-determinism test. It’s an edited version of the past. What we don’t hear about is all the other people whom American intelligence had under surveillance, how many other warnings they received, and how many other tips came in that seemed promising at the time but led nowhere. The central challenge of intelligence gathering has always been the problem of “noise”: the fact that useless information is vastly more plentiful than useful information. Shelby’s report mentions that the FBI’s counterterrorism division has sixty-eight thousand outstanding and unassigned leads dating back to 1995. And, of those, probably no more than a few hundred are useful. Analysts, in short, must be selective, and the decisions made in Kenya, by that standard, do not seem unreasonable. Surveillance on the cell was shut down, but, then, its leader had left the country. Bushnell warned Washington—but, as The Cell admits, there were bomb warnings in Africa all the time. Officials at the Mossad thought the Kenyan intelligence was dubious, and the Mossad ought to know. Ahmed may have worked for bin Laden but he failed a polygraph test, and it was also learned that he had previously given similar—groundless—warnings to other embassies in Africa. When a man comes into your office, fails a lie-detector test, and is found to have shopped the same unsubstantiated story all over town, can you be blamed for turning him out?
Miller, Stone, and Mitchell make the same mistake when they quote from a transcript of a conversation that was recorded by Italian intelligence in August of 2001 between two Al Qaeda operatives, Abdel Kader Es Sayed and a man known as al Hilal. This, they say, is yet another piece of intelligence that “seemed to forecast the September 11 attacks.”
“I’ve been studying airplanes,” al Hilal tells Es Sayed. “If God wills, I hope to be able to bring you a window or a piece of a plane the next time I see you.”
“What, is there a jihad planned?” Es Sayed asks.
