Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

merchants’ wives in Jedda mosques; bags of cash delivered by businessmen to Riyadh charities as zakat, an annual Islamic tithe; fat checks written from semi-official government accounts by minor Saudi princes; bountiful proceeds raised in annual telethons led by Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh; and richest of all were the annual transfers from the Saudi General Intelligence Department, or Istakhbarat, to the CIA’s Swiss bank accounts.”⁷⁷

From the moment agency money and weapons started to flow to the mujahideen in 1980, Saudi Arabia matched U.S. payments dollar for dollar. The Saudis also bypassed Pakistan’s ISI and supplied funds directly to groups in Afghanistan they favored, particularly the one led by their own pious young millionaire Osama bin Laden. According to the CIA’s Milton Bearden, private Saudi and Arab funding of up to $25 million a month flowed to Afghan Islamist armies. Equally important, starting in 1986, Pakistan trained between 16,000 and 18,000 fresh Muslim recruits on the Afghan frontier every year, and another 6,500 or so were instructed by Afghans inside the country beyond ISI control. Most of these eventually joined bin Laden’s fundamentalist army of 35,000 “Arab Afghans.”⁷⁸

Even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, the CIA continued to follow Pakistani initiatives, such as aiding Hekmatyar’s successor, the one-eyed Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, and watched Afghanistan descend into one of the more horrific civil wars of the twentieth century. The CIA did not fully awaken to its naive and ill-informed reading of Afghan politics (which was a typical Cold War superpower’s blindness to the distinctiveness of contested local areas) until after bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on August 7, 1998. Even then, the agency defined the Islamist threat almost exclusively in terms of Osama bin Laden’s leadership of al-Qaeda and failed to take in the larger context, including the policies of Pakistani military intelligence, or the funds flowing to the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Instead, it devoted itself solely to trying to capture or kill bin Laden himself.

On February 23, 1998, bin Laden had summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the camp at Khost, in the eastern part of Afghanistan, that the CIA had built for him at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. There he announced the creation of a new organization—the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders—and issued a manifesto saying that “to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.” Just over five months later, he and his associates put this manifesto into effect with their devastating embassy truck bombings in Africa.

By then the CIA had identified bin Laden’s family compound in the open desert near Kandahar Airport, a collection of buildings called Tarnak Farm. It is possible that more satellite footage has been taken of this site than of any other place on Earth; one famous picture seems to show bin Laden standing outside the home of one of his wives. The CIA conceived an elaborate plot to kidnap bin Laden from Tarnak Farm with the help of Afghan operatives and spirit him out of the country, but CIA director George Tenet canceled the project because of the high risk of civilian casualties (for which the operations wing of the agency would later scorn him). Meanwhile, the Clinton White House ordered submarines to be stationed in the northern Arabian Sea with the map coordinates of Tarnak Farm preloaded into their missile-guidance systems. They were waiting for hard evidence from the CIA that bin Laden was in residence.⁷⁹

Within days of the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed a top secret finding authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against bin Laden. On August 20, 1998, he ordered seventy-five cruise missiles, costing $750,000 each, to be fired at the Zawhar Kili camp (about seven miles south of Khost), reportedly the site of a major al- Qaeda meeting. The attack killed twenty-one Pakistanis but bin Laden had been forewarned, perhaps by Saudi intelligence. Two of the missiles fell into Pakistan, causing Islamabad to denounce the U.S. action. At the same time, the United States fired thirteen cruise missiles into a chemical plant in Khartoum that the CIA claimed was partly owned by bin Laden and secretly manufacturing nerve gas. (It was actually a pharmaceutical factory.)

The American public and many critics around the world were skeptical about both the claims and the motivation for the attacks because three days earlier Clinton had publicly confessed to his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinsky. The film Wag the Dog had also just been released. In it a president in the middle of an election campaign is charged with molesting a “Girl Guide” and manufactures a fake war against an Eastern European country in order to distract public attention. As a result, Clinton became more cautious, while he and his aides began to question the quality of the CIA’s intelligence they were being offered. The May 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by an American B-2 stealth bomber, thanks to faulty intelligence, further discredited the agency during Clinton’s air assault against Serbia. (A year later, DCI Tenet would fire an intelligence officer and reprimand six managers, including a senior official, for their bungling of that incident.)⁸⁰ The Clinton administration made two more unsuccessful attempts to capture or kill bin Laden. He was, of course, still around as the second Bush administration began, and he ordered the infamous strikes against the United States itself. He then survived the American invasion of Afghanistan to fight another day (and release endless videotaped analyses and exhortations to his followers for years to come).

In the end, the CIAs covert operations in Afghanistan were detrimental to any American foreign policy goals. They usually became entangled in hopeless webs of secrecy and ignorance, invariably laying the foundations for devastating future blowback operations. Former presidential terrorism adviser Richard Clarke argues that “the CIA used its classification rules not only to protect its agents but also to deflect outside scrutiny of its covert operations,” and Peter Tomsen, the American liaison with the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance during the late 1980s, concluded that “America s failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work.”⁸¹

A more recent example of CIA folly overlaid by baroque attempts at secrecy, all on orders from the president, is the carrying out of extraordinary renditions—a bit of official jargon intended to hide one of the more morally depraved practices of the executive branch of the U.S. government. “Extraordinary renditions” simply mean the CIA kidnappings of terror suspects off the streets of foreign cities, flying them either to countries with no record of human rights protections or else to secret CIA prisons outside the U.S., and there having them tortured. The practice seems today to have become an integral part of the imperial presidency, protected by the argument developed by administration lawyers that in time of war (even when that war has been unilaterally declared by the president and deemed a generational struggle) the president as commander in chief is essentially beyond the law.

Secret police and state terrorist agencies normally try to disguise what they are doing by hiding behind bland euphemisms for their most odious operations. As long ago as the eighteenth century, Voltaire observed, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” On sanitizing language, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura writes, “By camouflaging pernicious activities in innocent or sanitizing parlance, the activities lose much of their repugnancy. Bombing missions are described as ‘servicing the target/ in the likeness of a public utility. The attacks become ‘clean, surgical strikes/ arousing imagery of curative activities. The civilians whom the bomb kills are linguistically converted to ‘collateral damage.’... In the vocabulary of the lawbreakers in Nixon’s administration, criminal conspiracy became a ‘game plan,’ and the conspirators were ‘team players,’ like the best of sportsmen.”⁸²

Typifying this deliberate whitewashing, the Nazi Party’s SS had its “transportations,” meaning the shipping of trainloads of prisoners to death camps; the British had their “civilizing mission” in Kenya, meaning the rounding up of members of the indigenous population and sodomizing, castrating, and killing thousands of them; the Japanese had their “comfort women,” meaning girls and women they kidnapped in occupied countries and forced at gunpoint to work as frontline prostitutes; and the CIA has its “renditions.” This is an unusual locution. In most dictionaries, a “rendition” is a performance or an interpretation of a piece of music or a role in a play, as in: “That was a nice rendition of Duke Ellington’s ‘Jubilee Stomp.’“ But the CIA uses it as a transitive verb—to render (as in “render unto