4. The Targeting Engine
There had been times, off and on, when the United States government knew where Osama bin Laden was. The CIA had been interested in him since 1991, after he moved from Afghanistan to the Sudan. Almost everywhere the agency looked in the expanding Sunni extremist world, his name came up. Not as a commander but as the go-to person for false documents, money, training, weapons, or chemicals that could be made into bombs. In December 1995, the agency created a small bin Laden unit, headed by Michael Scheuer.
A burly, confident man with a full beard and glasses who speaks with a flat Midwestern accent, Scheuer was less inclined than many in the CIA hierarchy to swallow his own opinions. He had not been a typical CIA recruit. A Buffalo native, he had worked as a rigger for Union Carbide while earning two master’s degrees and then a PhD at the University of Manitoba, in Canada. He believed his bin Laden unit was the first ever established to hunt down an individual, and as the effort matured—as he learned more and more about bin Laden—he grew increasingly convinced of the danger al Qaeda posed for the United States. In time, his assessment of that danger outpaced his superiors’. His small group worked out of an office in a business center just a short drive from the main CIA campus at Langley. Scheuer named the office after his son Alec: “ALEC Station.”
The best weapon they had for gathering intelligence at that point was rendition, the practice of arresting a suspect and turning him over to authorities in another country for interrogation. The practice enabled the agency to at least technically abide by rules against torture. The CIA obtained assurances that captives would not be abused, which some foreign governments likely honored more diligently than others. At that point the agency did not have the option of killing suspected senior terrorists: they had to be arrested and held somewhere. Rendition enabled the Clinton administration to avoid the legal difficulties of placing them in U.S. custody. As Scheuer would remember it, this was not so much a matter of explicit policy as it was policy by default. He would seek guidance from the White House about what to do with a target, and the answer would come back, “That’s your problem.” The problem was solved by willing governments in East Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East.
Rendition did not, as it happens, produce the first big breakthrough for ALEC Station. That came in September 1996, when a Sudanese militant named Jamal al-Fadl, a former close associate of bin Laden’s, turned up at the U.S. embassy in Eritrea offering to tell everything he knew about al Qaeda. He was flown to the United States and placed in the federal witness-protection program. He provided the first trove of fresh information about bin Laden and his organization—about its personalities, structure, and planned operations. His relevations ratcheted up interest in the group, which was clearly willing and able to launch major terror attacks.
By 1999, ALEC Station employed twenty-seven people, many of them women. They ran an unorthodox CIA office, very informal. People dressed casually. Because it maintained informants and contacts worldwide, the office was open twenty-four hours a day. Everyone worked long hours so few formalities of office life took hold. Scheuer would nap every afternoon in his office. As their sense of the threat posed by al Qaeda grew, so did their sense of mission. Some in the office, like Scheuer, passed up offers for promotions in order to stay with the work. Marriages broke up. The place had a cultish feel. Because Scheuer presided over so many dedicated women officers, some started calling his group “the Manson family.”
They couldn’t get bin Laden arrested in the Sudan, so they came up with a plan to harass him. He had a number of large projects under way there—road building, agricultural programs, and businesses. He was also actively underwriting terror attacks throughout the region. So ALEC Station proposed sabotaging his construction equipment. They wanted to spike engines with slurry that would force them to seize up. When the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was briefed on the plan, one member objected: “If you do that, won’t you be putting some Sudanese farmer out of work?” The project was scrapped.
Not long afterward, when the attempted assassination of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was linked to al Qaeda
For once they could watch bin Laden closely and listen to him and his people. Lacking the authority to kill him, Scheuer’s group laid plans to kidnap him—that would have been in May or June of 1998, several months before the embassy bombings in East Africa. They intended to hold him in a remote mountainous area for interrogation and then fly him to an Arab state for imprisonment (unless the United States decided to prosecute him directly). They fleshed out a raid in detail, a snatch-and-grab mission inside Afghanistan employing a special ops team delivered by helicopter. But when the plan was run up the chain it was vetoed as too risky. American forces might get killed, and because bin Laden lived with his wives and children, some of the children might be harmed. Scheuer recalled being mystified by the decision. He asked, “How much more of a threat do you need before you finally do something?”
When Director George Tenet paid a visit to ALEC Station not long afterward, one of the women on Scheuer’s staff confronted him angrily: “You and the White House are going to get thousands of Americans killed.”
Tenet told them that he understood their anger, but that it would subside. By now the group’s growing sense of urgency, coupled with its cultish image and high number of female staffers, had begun to work against it. They were seen as overly emotional and alarmist. Tenet’s response reflected this subtle prejudice and rankled ALEC Station still further.
“You will all think clearer in a couple of days,” he said.
In August, after the embassy bombings, Scheuer recalls being asked if the plan to kidnap bin Laden could still be pursued. The answer was no. Bin Laden knew that the chances of America taking action would grow after those attacks. He had gone into hiding. They had missed the chance.
By now, the United States was willing to use lethal force on bin Laden. President Clinton authorized two cruise missile strikes soon after the embassy bombings, one targeting Al-Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum thought to be developing chemical weapons, and the other targeting a bin Laden camp near Khowst. The missiles hit on August 20, fired from ships in the Arabian Sea. The CIA would estimate that twenty to thirty people were killed—but not bin Laden, who had reportedly left the Khowst camp a few hours earlier.
After that, the project for ALEC Station became pinpointing bin Laden long enough in advance to be targeted. They presented the White House with eight such opportunities, Scheuer recalled, and each time the strike was called off, primarily over concerns about collateral damage. The CIA man had always been prickly and eccentric. He was so much more willing to accept collateral casualties than his superiors—was so convinced that the threat posed by bin Laden warranted drastic, immediate action—that he had begun to be regarded with suspicion. He seemed obsessed.
In 1998, on the Sunday before Christmas, ALEC Station learned that bin Laden was staying in the Haji Habash house, part of the governor’s palace in Kandahar. The CIA had a local spy who knew which wing of the building bin Laden was in, and even which room, because he had escorted him there. It was first-rate, firsthand intelligence, and a target that could easily be reached by Tomahawk missiles launched from ships in the Arabian Sea.
“Hit him tonight—we may not get another chance,” advised Gary Schroen, ALEC Station’s field officer.
Scheuer took it directly to the White House, along with Director Tenet and John Gordon, the deputy director. It was snowing. The three men drove from Langley into D.C. together, but inside the White House only Tenet was allowed into the meeting, which the Clinton administration’s principals joined by teleconference. Scheuer and Gordon waited outside for hours. The missile strike was not authorized. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, there was concern that as many as three hundred people might be killed or injured, and that there was thought to be too great a chance of bin Laden moving at the last minute, as he had before. There was also a mosque nearby that might have been damaged. The CIA men drove back up the George Washington Parkway, disappointed yet again. Scheuer was particularly upset by the administration’s worry about damaging a mosque.
The next day, with the opportunity gone, Scheuer wrote to his field officer, Schroen, that he had not been able to sleep. “I’m sure we’ll regret not acting last night.”
“We should have done it last night,” Schroen wrote back. “We may well come to regret the decision not to go ahead.”
