Notes

PROLOGUE

1. The account in this chapter of Schroen's visit to Kabul, the details of his discussions with Massoud, and the history between them more than five years earlier is drawn from multiple interviews with U.S. government officials and Afghan government officials, including Gary Schroen, May 7 and September 19, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC).

2. Massoud's troops raged out of control against Hazaras, an Afghan Shiite group, in the Kabul neighborhood of Karte She in March 1995, committing rapes and looting stores. See "Afghanistan, Crisis of Impunity," Human Rights Watch, July 2001, p. 22.

3. CIA Operating Directives are derived from an annual assessment of American intelligence priorities as determined by a special interagency board meeting in Washington. The board's goal is to ensure that intelligence collection conforms to the priorities of White House foreign and defense policies. Each CIA station receives its own specific O.D. In theory, the performance of a station chief may be judged based on how well he or she recruits agents who can report on the issues listed in the O.D. In practice, CIA station chiefs traditionally have enjoyed substantial autonomy and are not strictly measured against the O.D.

4. That Afghanistan was assigned to Langley is from an interview with a U.S. government official.

5. Christopher, during prepared testimony for his confirmation hearings on January 25, 1993, devoted only four out of more than four thousand words to Afghanistan, saying that "restoring peace to Afghanistan" was in America's interest. Four months later, on May 28, Christopher told a CNN interviewer: "[W]e're very concerned about the situation in Afghanistan and the fact that it does seem to be a breeding ground for terrorist activities around the world, and I think that we're going to pay particular attention to that there. Some countries, unfortunately, in some areas of the world . . . seem to be sponsoring more terrorism as it leeches out with its ugly spokes of the pitchfork into other countries." According to a Lexis-Nexis search, Christopher did not publicly mention Afghanistan again during his term as Secretary of State except in four passing references, none of which addressed American policies or interests there.

6. That it was an Ariana Afghan plane: Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. xxvii. For a specific account of the Afghans who greeted him, see Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, July 6, 2002.

7. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 93-94.

8. Interviews with U.S. government officials. See also "Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier," publicly released CIA assessment, 1996.

9. Interviews with U.S. government officials. The unit's existence has also been described in numerous press reports.

10. The numbers cited here are from interviews with U.S. government officials, as is the description of the Stinger recovery program. For an early account of the program, see Molly Moore, The Washington Post, March 7, 1994.

11. The prices and commission system cited are from interviews with U.S. government officials and Pakistani intelligence officials, including an interview with Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi (Ret.), who was director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence from 1993 to 1995, May 19, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC). Qazi said the Pakistanis charged the Americans $80,000 per returned missile, which he said is also what ISI had to pay to buy a missile from the Afghans.

12. The quotations are from interviews with Schroen, May 7 and September 19, 2002, confirmed by Afghan officials involved.

13. Gannon, Associated Press, July 6, 2002.

14. Anthony Davis, "How the Taliban Became a Military Force," in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 68.

15. Glyn Davies, State Department Regular Briefing, September 27, 1996, Federal Document Clearing House. Davies also said during the briefing that the Taliban had announced "that Afghans can return to Kabul without fear, and that Afghanistan is the common home of all Afghans and we [take] those statements as an indication that the Taliban intends to respect the rights of all Afghans." When asked about the Taliban's imposition of strict Islamic law in other areas under their control, Davies responded, "We've seen some of the reports that they've moved to impose Islamic law in the areas that they control. But at this stage, we're not reading anything into that. I mean, there's-on the face of it, nothing objectionable at this stage. . . . Remember, we don't have any American officials in Kabul. We haven't had them since the Soviets left because we've judged it too dangerous to maintain a mission there. So what we're reacting to for the most part are press reports, reports from others who, in fact, have sources there-in other words, second-, third-hand reports."

16. Interview with a U.S. government official. The circumstantial evidence of Schroen's ill-timed trip also seems a powerful indicator that the U.S. intelligence community did not expect Massoud to collapse so quickly. The U.S. ambassador to Islamabad at the time, Tom Simons, said that the embassy did not forecast the fall of Kabul in any of its reporting to Washington. Author's interview with Tom Simons, August 19, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

CHAPTER 1: "WE'RE GOING TO DIE HERE"

1. Associated Press, November 22, 1979.

2. Associated Press, November 30, 1979.

3. The detailed account in this chapter of how the attack unfolded, and how embassy personnel responded, is drawn from multiple interviews with U.S. officials, including Lloyd Miller,November 18, 2002, Quantico, Virginia (GW), and Gary Schroen, August 29, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC). The account also draws from interviews given to reporters in Islamabad at the time. Among the latter were multiple eyewitness Associated Press dispatches of November 21 and 22, 1979; Stuart Auerbach's first-day narrative inThe Washington Post, November 22, 1979; and Tom Morganthau, Carol Honsa, and Fred Coleman in Newsweek, December 3, 1979. Marcia Gauger, the only journalist to see the riot unfold from inside the embassy, wrote an account for the December 3, 1979,Timemagazine in which she directly contradicted the Carter administration's claim that the Pakistani government had been instrumental in saving U.S. personnel. The man Gauger was supposed to meet for lunch that day, political counselor Herbert G. Hagerty, later provided a comprehensive reconstruction of the attack in a chapter for the book Embassies Under Siege, edited by Joseph G. Sullivan. See also Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, pp. 242-45.

4. Three Western reporters interviewed Jamaat student union officers at Quaid-I-Azam University immediately after the riots. The union officers appeared to accept responsibility for organizing the demonstrations, expressed regret over the loss of life, but adamantly defended their cause. Stuart Auerbach, "Politics and Religion: A Volatile Mix for Zia in Pakistan," The Washington Post, November 26, 1979. Michael T. Kaufman, "Students in Islamabad See a Growing Islamic Uprising," The New York Times,November 26, 1979. The most detailed account of Jamaat's role at the university during this period is in The Economist, December 1, 1979.

5. For a deep account of the impact of Saudi funding on Jamaat and other similar organizations at major universities in the Islamic world and elsewhere, see Gilles Kepel, Jihad, pp. 61-105.

6. Associated Press, November 21, 1979.

7. Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 395-96; Fortune, March 10, 1980; Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 20-21; Newsweek, December 3, 1979.

8. The Muslim, November 21, 1979. The day's paper, a special edition, offered some of the first signs that trouble was brewing. Below the first two stories on the front page-"Unidentified Armed Men Occupy Kaba" and "U.S.May Use Force"-was a third story titled "Anger in 'Pindi." The story reported that shopkeepers in Rawalpindi shuttered their stores "and came out in the streets in a spontaneous reaction. By midday all shops in the main bazaars and shopping centres were closed and large processions were forming tomarch. . . . They were shouting anti-Zionist and anti-Imperialist slogans."

9. Interview with a U.S. official familiar with the reports.

10. Interviews with U.S. officials. The CIA later reconstructed a comprehensive account of the Islamabad embassy attack that became the basis of a lecture course in embassy security taught to young case officers.

11. Associated Press, November 21, 1979.

12. That the company supplied Grand Mosque blueprints to security forces: Financial Times, August 22, 1998. Osama bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, the company's founder and patriarch, had earlier received a large contract from the Saudi royal family to renovate and extend the Grand Mosque. His company also constructed highways leading to Mecca.

13. Newsweek, December 3, 1979.

14. What Prince Turki concluded about the Mecca uprising: "Memorandum of Conversation Between HRH Prince Turki and Senator Bill Bradley," April 13, 1980, author's files. Quotations from Tehran: The New York Times, November 23, 1979; The WashingtonPost, November 23, 1979.

15. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, distributed November 23, 1979.

CHAPTER 2: "LENIN TAUGHT US"

1. Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, pp. 53-56.

2. The figure of 3,725 military officers trained by the Soviets is from Larry P. Good-son, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 51, and Barnett B. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 71. The figure of twelve thousand political prisoners is from Martin Ewans,Afghanistan, p. 142. Rubin provides detailed accounts of early Afghan communist campaigns to destroy traditional tribal and religious leadership through mass imprisonments and murders.

3. Svetlana Savranskaya, working paper, "Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War," October 9, 2001.

4. Robert Gates estimates "up to 20" Soviet officers killed in his unpublished manuscript, Chapter 11, pp. 36-37. Ewans cites the more typical estimate of "possibly one hundred." The Soviets never provided a specific accounting.

5. "Meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union," March 17, 1979, transcript of proceedings, originally classified Top Secret, translated and released by the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. This and other original American and Soviet documents cited in this chapter were first assembled in English as "Toward an International History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989," a notebook of documents compiled by Christian F. Ostermann and Mirceau Munteanu of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The documents were released at a conference organized by Ostermann on April 29-30, 2002. Also participating in the project were the Asia Program and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center; the George Washington Cold War Group at George Washington University; and the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.

6. Ibid., March 18, 1979.

7. The original source for this transcript is in "Limited Contingent," by Boris Gromov, the Soviet general who led the Fortieth Army's retreat from Afghanistan, published in Russian by Progress, Moscow, 1994. The version here was translated into English and released by the Cold War International History Project, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

8. The options paper and covering memo are in Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144. The attitude of officers in the Near East Division is from the author's interviews.

9. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 131.

10. Interviews with multiple officers who served in the Directorate of Operations, and particularly the Near East Division, during this period.

11. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144.

12. Ibid.

13. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 57. Mohammed Yousaf, a brigadier general in the Afghan bureau of the Pakistani intelligence service, later estimated that massive defections dropped the size of the Afghan army from about 100,000 to about 25,000 men by 1980. Goodson uses similar figures, estimating a collapse from 80,000 to 30,000 men during the same period, primarily due to desertions to the rebels.

14. "Afghanistan: Prospects for Soviet Intervention," AMEMBASSY Moscow to SECSTATE, Moscow 13083, released by the Cold War International History Project. The American government's system of document classification is richly complicated and constantly changing. Generally, "Confidential" is the lowest level of document classification, "Secret" is the next highest, then "Top Secret." A Top Secret document can be further compartmented by limiting circulation to a short list of readers cleared with a particular temporary code word-this designation is usually called Top Secret/Codeword. The gradations of secrecy persist because they provide a crude system to determine which classes of government employees need to be investigated, supervised, and cleared to read certain classes of secret documents.

15. "Report to the CPSU CC on the Situation in Afghanistan," June 28, 1979, Top Secret, Special Folder. Translated by the Cold War International History Project. The original Russian source was "The Tragedy and Valor of the Afghani" by A. A. Likhovskii, Moscow: GPI "Iskon," 1995.

16. "To the Soviet Ambassador," June 28, 1979, Top Secret, translated by the Cold War International History Project. Kremlin records make clear that Taraki continued to ask for Soviet troops, in disguise if necessary, through the summer of 1979.

17. The date of the finding is from Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 143 and 146. Years later Brzezinski would tell an interviewer from Le Nouvel Observateur (January 15 and January 21, 1998, p. 76) that he had "knowingly increased the probability" that the Soviets would intervene in Afghanistan by authorizing the secret aid. Brzezinski implied that he had slyly lured the Soviets into a trap in Afghanistan. But his contemporary memos-particularly those written in the first days after the Soviet invasion-make clear that while Brzezinski was determined to confront the Soviets in Afghanistan through covert action, he was also very worried that the Soviets would prevail. Those early memos show no hint of satisfaction that the Soviets had taken some sort of Afghan bait. Given this evidence and the enormous political and security costs that the invasion imposed on the Carter administration, any claim that Brzezinski lured the Soviets into Afghanistan warrants deep skepticism.

18. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, passed into law in 1974, established the need for a formal presidential "finding" for covert action. Several subsequent executive orders and presidential security directives provided for the detailed process by which presidential covert action findings are drafted, approved, and implemented within the executive branch, including at the CIA, which is identified by the law as the primary federal agency for covert action. (If the president wants another U.S. agency to participate in a covert action, this must be spelled out in a finding; otherwise, the CIA is the default agency for such programs.) The provisions of Hughes-Ryan were overtaken in U.S. law by the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 1991. This law spells out what had previously been a more informal standard, namely, that covert action must be "necessary to support identifiable foreign policy objectives" and also must be "important to the national security of the United States." For a definitive review of U.S. law governing covert action, see Michael W. Reisman and James E. Baker, Regulating Covert Action, from which these quotes and citations are drawn.

19. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 146.

20. "The KGB in Afghanistan," by Vasiliy Mitrokhin, English edition, Working Paper No. 40, Cold War International History Project, introduced and edited by Odd Arne Westad and Christian F. Ostermann, Washington, D.C., February 2002. Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to Great Britain as Soviet communism collapsed, has provided in this paper detailed citations of KGB files and cables relevant to Afghanistan dating back to the early 1960s.

21. This account is drawn in part from recollections by American and Soviet participants in the events who appeared at the conference "Toward an International History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989," in Washington, D.C., April 29-30, 2002. That the KGB planted stories that Amin was a CIA agent is from Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 50. The Indian document is from the recollection of a senior officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations at that time. See also "Partners in Time" by Charles G. Cogan, World Policy Journal, Summer 1993, p. 76. Cogan ran the Near East Division of the Directorate of Operations beginning in mid-1979. He wrote that the Soviets had "unfounded" suspicions that Amin worked for the CIA because of "Amin's supposed American connections (he had once had some sort of loose association with the Asia Foundation)."

22. Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 93.

23. Amstutz offered his recollections at the April 2002 conference. Recollections of the Near East Division officers are from the author's interviews.

24. Account of the Kabul station's priorities and its failure to predict the 1978 coup is from the author's interview with Warren Marik, March 11, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Marik served as a CIA case officer in Kabul from late 1977 until early 1980. The general outline of his account was confirmed by other U.S. officials familiar with the Kabul station during those years.

25. "What Are the Soviets Doing in Afghanistan?" memorandum is from Thomas Thornton, assistant to the president for national security, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, September 17, 1979, released by the Cold War International History Project.

26. "Personal Memorandum, Andropov to Brezhnev," in early December 1979, is from notes taken by A. F. Dobrynin and provided to the Norwegian Nobel Institute, translated and released by the Cold War International History Project.

27. Multiple sources cite Politburo records of the tentative decision to invade on November 26, including Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 51. The infiltration of Karmal on December 7 and the account of the attempts to poison Amin are from "New Russian Evidence on the Crisis and War in Afghanistan" by Aleksandr A. Lyakhovski, Working Paper No. 41, draft, Cold War International History Project. The KGB assault plans are from Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," pp. 96-106.

28. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 133.

29. Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 106.

30. "Reflections on Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan," memorandum for the president from Zbigniew Brzezinski, December 26, 1979, released by the Cold War International History Project.

31. "Memorandum for the Secretary of State," January 2, 1980, released by the Cold War International History Project.

CHAPTER 3: "GO RAISE HELL"

1. Interviews with Howard Hart, November 12, 2001, November 26, 2001, and November 27, 2001, in Virginia, as well as subsequent telephone and email communications (SC). Abdul Haq was killed by Taliban troops inside Afghanistan in October 2001. He had entered eastern Afghanistan, against the advice of the CIA, in order to stir up opposition to the Taliban in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks. That Hart and the CIA maintained a close relationship with Haq until the late 1980s comes not only from Hart but from the author's interviews with several other U.S. officials.

2. Interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001. His biography is also described in George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, pp. 117-21, also based on interviews with Hart.

3. Interviews with former CIA officials from this period. That George was a post-man's son is from Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 62.

4. Lessard's conflict with Hart and the worries he expressed around the time of his death are from interviews with U.S. officials who knew Lessard.

5. Quotes and Hart's point of view are from interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001.

6. Interviews with U.S. officials familiar with the 1979 presidential findings. See also Steve Coll, The Washington Post, July 19 and 20, 1992.

7. Charles G. Cogan, "Partners in Time," World Policy Journal, Summer 1993. Cogan has written that the first Lee Enfield rifles authorized for the mujahedin by Carter's amended finding arrived in Pakistan about ten days after the Soviet invasion. Details of other weapons supplied are from the author's interviews with Hart and other U.S. officials.

8. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan, p. 158. The KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin, in "The KGB in Afghanistan," cites KGB statistics, unavailable to the CIA at the time, showing more than five thousand reported rebel actions in 1981 and almost twice as many the next year. "Using the methods of terror and intimidation and playing on religious and national sentiments, the counterrevolutionaries have a strong influence on a considerable part of the country's population," the Soviet Fortieth Army's headquarters admitted to Moscow in June 1980. See "Excerpt from a report of 40th Army HQ," released by the Cold War International History Project.

9. The Bangkok meeting and Hart's cabling are from interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001. See also Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, pp. 125-26. The January 1982 cable is cited in Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 251. Gates reports that CIA director William Casey read this cable from Hart. Unbeknownst to the CIA, during the same month that Hart cabled seeking more and better weapons, the KGB Residency in Kabul reported to the Politburo that "the counter-revolutionary forces have managed to keep their zones of influence and to attract a considerable part of the population into the struggle against the existing regime." See Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," p. 132.

10. Interviews with former CIA officials. Typical was the observation of Fred "Fritz" Ermath, a former CIA Soviet analyst, who said, "The Kermit Roosevelts, the Cord Meyers were gone. . . . The old guys were hearts and minds guys. . . . But they were gone, see? And I think this generational shift, again with the Vietnam experience as part of the saga . . . The new guys said, 'Well, we're going to stick to our operational meaning, and what we can do is deliver mules, money and mortars.' "

11. The bounty idea is from interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001. It is not clear whether the system was ever implemented by ISI.

12. Mary Ann Weaver, Pakistan, p. 57.

13. Ibid., p. 61.

14. "Devout Muslim, yes," is from Mohammed Yousaf, Silent Soldier, pp. 99-100.

15. "Afghan youth will fight," is from "Memorandum of Conversation," President Reagan and President Zia-ul-Haq, December 7, 1982, released by the Cold War International History Project.

16. Mitrokhin, "KGB in Afghanistan," pp. 151-52. Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, p. 49.

17. Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, pp. 256-57.

18. "Your Meeting with Pakistan President . . ." Memo from Shultz to Reagan, November 29, 1982, and "Visit of Zia-ul-Haq," from Shultz, also dated November 29, 1982, both released by the Cold War International History Project.

19. The CIA's analysts understood Zia's ambivalence about the United States. In a special estimate prepared on November 12, 1982, the CIA reported, "Islamabad is aware that only the United States can offset Soviet pressures and provide Pakistan with the sophisticated weapons it believes it needs." Yet "the Pakistanis continue to doubt the reliability of U.S. commitments and U.S. steadfastness in time of crisis." See "Special National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan," November 12, 1982, released by the Cold War International History Project.

20. Interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001, and with Yousaf, June 1992, Dusseldorf, Germany (SC). A retired Pakistani brigadier general at the time of the interviews, Mohammed Yousaf is the coauthor of The Bear Trap, a detailed account of the ISI's Afghan operations between 1983 and 1987.

21. ISI telephone codes are from the author's 1992 interviews with Yousaf, June 1992. ISI rules about CIA contact with Afghans are from Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001, and other U.S. officials familiar with the liaison. Yousaf said that he and Akhtar were blindfolded while visiting the United States. A U.S. official interviewed in 1992 said he "wouldn't steer you away from that. We do have sensitive facilities."

22. Yousaf, Silent Soldier, pp. 25-27. Akhtar's professional information is on pp. 27-32.

23. The size of the ISI Afghan bureau is from Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, pp. 1-3. How ISI was perceived is from interviews with Yousaf and other ISI and Pakistan army generals.

24. Published estimates of U.S. covert aid between fiscal 1981 and 1984 include Barnett R. Rubin, Refugee Survey Quarterly, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1996. These estimates were confirmed in interviews with several U.S. officials. Fiscal year 1984 was an unusual, complicated year because surplus Pentagon funds were added to the pipeline at the last hour. The Soviet figures cited here are from Larry P. Good-son, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 63.

25. Details of the weapons systems and financial details are from Yousaf, June 1992; Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001; and other U.S. officials familiar with the pipeline during these years. Yousaf and Adkin describe many of these purchases in The Bear Trap.The Turkish incident comes from interviews with Yousaf. Hart recalled that the CIA paid the Chinese about $80 for a Kalashnikov copy that probably cost them about $12 or $15 to make. Because the Chinese enforced the greatest quality control in their manufacturing, over time most of the CIA's covert purchases shifted toward Beijing. State-owned Chinese ships always seemed to steam into Karachi on just the date they were due, and the assistant Chinese defense attaché from the Islamabad embassy would invariably be standing at dockside, clipboard in hand.

26. Interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001, and Yousaf, June 1992.

27. See Chapter 7 for a more detailed account of this issue.

28. "The Secretary's Visit to Pakistan: Afghanistan," cable from U.S. embassy, Islamabad, to Secretary of State, June 1, 1983, released by the Cold War International History Project.

29. A copy of the letter was obtained by the author. Hart's trip into Afghanistan is from interviews with Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001. He is the only source for the account of the trip. At least two other D.O. officers, including a later Islamabad station chief, also made unauthorized trips into Afghanistan during the Soviet phase of the war, according to U.S. officials familiar with the trips.

CHAPTER 4: "I LOVE DOSAMA"

1. This account of Badeeb's trip to Pakistan and his meeting with Zia is from the author's interview with Ahmed Badeeb and Saeed Badeeb on February 1, 2002, in Jedda, Saudi Arabia (SC). The interview lasted approximately two hours and was conducted in English. Subsequently, Ahmed Badeeb supplied to the author videotapes of two days of interviews he gave early in 2002 to an Arabic language satellite news service based in Lebanon, Orbit Television. The author employed a Washington, D.C.-based firm to translate these Orbit interviews from Arabic into English. Some of the quotations of Badeeb in this chapter, such as the account of his visit with boxes of cash to Pakistan, are from the author's interview. Other quotations are from the Orbit interviews, as rendered into English by the translation service. The distinctions are indicated in the footnotes. That Badeeb attended college in North Dakota is from an interview with a U.S. official.

2. Interview with Nat Kern, January 23, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Kern maintains close contacts with the Saudi government as the editor of a newsletter about oil markets and Middle East politics. The quote from Turki is attributed by Kern to his business partner, Frank Anderson, a retired clandestine officer in the CIA's Near East Division and at one time director of the D.O.'s Afghanistan task force.

3. Nawaf Obaid, "Improving U.S. Intelligence Analysis on the Saudi Arabian Decision Making Process," master's degree thesis, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1998. "Both believed fervently" is from Mohammed Yousaf,SilentSoldier, p. 87.

4. The Saudi air cover over Karachi is from the Badeeb interviews with Orbit.

5. The history of GID is from interviews with Saudi officials; with Nat Kern, January 23, 2002; a telephone interview with Ray Close, a former CIA station chief in Jedda who subsequently worked as a consultant to Prince Turki, January 10, 2002 (SC); and David Long, a former U.S. diplomat who also later worked for Prince Turki, January 22, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). By one account GID provided Sadat with a regular income during 1970 when Sadat was Egypt's vice president. See Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, p. 352.

6. Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, p. 213, quoting the British Arabist Gertrude Bell. Vassiliev's history, translated from the original Russian, draws heavily on original Arabic and Ottoman sources as well as the accounts of travelers; it is the principal source of the pre-twentieth-century Arabian peninsula history in this chapter.

7. The author owes the observation that Saudi Arabia was the first modern nation-state created by jihad to the anonymous author of a survey of the kingdom published in The Economist, March 23, 2002.

8. The demographic statistics are from Vassiliev, History of Saudi Arabia, p. 421.

9. The quotations are from a speech Prince Turki gave on February 3, 2002, in Washington, D.C.; it was transcribed and published on the World Wide Web by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Prince Turki also spoke briefly about his time at Lawrenceville during an interview with the author, August 2, 2002, in Cancun, Mexico (SC).

10. That Clinton did not know Turki at Georgetown and only met him after taking office is from interviews with senior Saudi officials and with Kern, January 23, 2002.

11. Quotations are from Turki's speech on February 3, 2002.

12. Ibid. The assassination of Turki's father is from Vassiliev, History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 394-95.

13. Interviews with Saudi and U.S. officials.

Government budget statistics are from The Economist, March 23, 2002. GID's computer expansion is from interviews with U.S. officials and Business Week, October 6, 1980.

14. Interviews with U.S. officials.

15. Author's interview with Ahmed Badeeb and Saeed Badeeb, February 1, 2002.

16. Interviews with Saudi officials. The George quote is from the author's interview with Clair George, December 21, 2001, Chevy Chase, Maryland (SC).

17. Interview with Saeed Badeeb, February 1, 2002. That their father was a modestly successful merchant in Jedda is from an interview with a Saudi newspaper editor.

18. That the Saudis arranged contacts for the CIA at the hajj is from interviews with former U.S. intelligence officials. The "Safari club" is from Turki's speech, February 3, 2002.

19. "Memorandum of Conversation between HRH Prince Turki and Senator Bill Bradley," April 13, 1980, author's files.

20. That the agreement with the Saudis to match funding dollar for dollar was reached in July is from the unpublished original manuscript of Robert Gates's memoir, p. 13/31. That Bandar used to hold on to the funds and that CIA officers speculated he was doing so to earn the interest is from interviews with three U.S. officials with direct knowledge. Hart, the Islamabad station chief from 1981 to 1984, said in interviews that the Saudis were frequently late in paying their bills, although he did not comment on Bandar's role.

21. Badeeb quotes are from the Orbit interview. Yousaf 's quote is from Yousaf, Silent Soldier, p. 88.

22. The account of the Taif conference and Badeeb's encounters with the mujahedin leaders and with Sayyaf is from the author's interview with Badeeb, February 1, 2002, and so is the following account of the relationship between GID and Saudi charities.

23. That Turki sometimes controlled where the charity funds could be directed is from an interview with Turki and with other Saudi officials. The Badeeb quote is from the author's interview, February 1, 2002.

24. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, pp. 41-48, provides a carefully sourced account of the bin Laden family's origins and business success.

25. Interview with Turki, August 2, 2002. That Faisal set up a trust to ensure the safe passage of the bin Laden firm to the older sons is also from that interview.

26. Bergen, Holy War, pp. 47-48. Bin Laden's allowance is reported in National Commission staff statement no. 15, p. 3-4.

27. Author's interview with Badeeb, February 1, 2002.

28. The Badeeb quote is from the author's interview, February 1, 2002.

29. Interviews with U.S. officials.

30. See, for instance, the testimony of Cofer Black, director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center between 1999 and 2002, September 26, 2002, to Congress's Joint Inquiry into the September 11 attacks. "We had no relationship with him [bin Laden] but we watched a 22-year-old rich kid from a prominent Saudi family change from frontline mujahedin fighter to a financier for road construction and hospitals." CIA Director George Tenet testified under oath on October 17, 2002, that during the 1980s, "While we knew of him, we have no record of any direct U.S. government contact with bin Laden at that time."

31. "I loved Osama . . ." and "He was not an extremist at all . . ." are Badeeb quotes from the Orbit interviews.

32. Ibid.

33. Quotations are from Turki's speech in Washington, D.C., February 3, 2002. He provided this version of his interactions with bin Laden during the 1980s in several other interviews as well.

34. Badeeb, Orbit interviews. (See p. 609, note 1.) It was during the first day's Orbit interview that Badeeb talked most openly and expansively about his relationship with bin Laden and about bin Laden's relationship with the Saudi government. At the the start of the second day's session, Badeeb interrupted his interviewer to volunteer a "clarification" that bin Laden was not a Saudi intelligence agent and that Badeeb met with him "only in my capacity as his former teacher." The sequence raises the possibility that Saudi government officials saw or heard about the first part of the interview, were displeased, and asked Badeeb to issue this "clarification."

CHAPTER 5: "DON'T MAKE IT OUR WAR"

1. Contents of briefing to Reagan from Robert Gates's unpublished original manuscript, p. 23/33.

2. Interviews with former CIA officials. Also Mohammad Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, pp. 193-95.

3. That McMahon wondered about the purpose of the covert war, Bob Woodward, Veil, p. 104. The Twetten quote is from Kirsten Lundberg, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May, "Politics of a Covert Action," p. 12. The Directorate of Intelligence assessment is from "Afghanistan: The Revolution After Four Years," CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, July 1982; declassified July 1999; released by the National Security Archive.

4. "The longest midlife crisis in history" is from George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 39. The book provides detailed and colorful accounts, mainly from Wilson and CIA officer Gust Avrakatos, of Wilson's role in the Soviet-Afghan conflict, which Crile regards as decisive. The book also describes in profane and painful detail Wilson's alcoholism, womanizing, self-infatuation, and extravagant, sometimes bullying global travel. The quotes from former Miss Northern Hemisphere are on p. 223.

5. The congressional resolution is quoted in Lundberg, Zelikow, and May, "Politics of a Covert Action," p. 20. "The U.S. had nothing . . ." is from Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 262.

6. There have been multiple accounts of William Casey's covert dealings with the Catholic Church during the 1980s. Some of his efforts in Central America were described in testimony at Clair George's criminal trial arising from the Iran-Contra scandal. About the CIA and the Church in Poland see Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi, His Holiness .

7. Interview with a former CIA official. See also Woodward, Veil, p. 130.

8. The quote from Mrs. Casey is from Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA, p. 26. The pre-CIA biographical material in this chapter draws heavily on Persico's strong work, which itself drew on access to Casey's papers and extensive interviews with his family and CIA colleagues. Also helpful was Casey's own scattered accounts of his war experiences and political outlook in Scouting the Future, an extensive collection of Casey's public speeches compiled by Herbert E. Meyer.

9. "Goosing ship builders" is from Persico, Casey, p. 51, and "ex-polo players" is on p. 56.

10. "Never had I been in contact," ibid., p. 57.

11. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

12. Fifty-eight teams, Persico, ibid., p. 79. Success rate and "We probably saved" and "for the first time," ibid., p. 83. See also Casey's speech of September 19, 1986, in Casey, Scouting the Future, pp. 218-27.

13. "Had been permitted to run down" is from Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 210. The vodka martini scene and "He would demand something," ibid., p. 198.

14. "The Mumbling Guy" is from the author's interview with Ahmed Badeeb, February 1, 2002, Jedda, Saudi Arabia (SC). The Reagan note to Bush is from Persico, Casey, p. 228. The Buckley quote, ibid., p. 571. "I can tell you" is from a speech on June 29, 1984, in Casey, Scouting the Future, p. 289.

15. "As a legacy" is from Casey's speech of May 21, 1982, in Casey, Scouting the Future, p. 11. "The primary battlefield" is from his speech of July 30, 1986, ibid., p. 26. "The isthmus" and "the oil fields" is from his speech of October 27, 1986, ibid., p. 35.

16. The Mein Kampf comparison is from Casey's speech of May 1, 1985, in Casey, Scouting the Future, p. 183. "That two can play the same game" is from his speech of October 27, 1986, ibid., p. 36. "Far fewer people" is from his speech of September 19, 1986, ibid., p. 299. "Afghan freedom fighters" is from his speech of October 23, 1981, ibid., pp. 119-20.

17. "Realistic counter-strategy" is from Casey's speech of October 29, 1983, ibid., pp. 119-20. p. 144. His discussions with Ames about communism and traditional religion are from his speech of May 1, 1985, ibid., pp. 186-87.

18. Casey and King Khalid, Persico, Casey, pp. 310-11. Casey and oil, interviews with former CIA officers and U.S. officials.

19. "Is completely involved" is from Yousaf, Silent Soldier, pp. 80-81. The $7,000 carpet is from Persico, Casey, p. 507. He reported the gift and passed the carpet to the U.S. government.

20. Persico, Casey, p. 226.

21. Casey and Zia, and Zia's red template, are from Charles G. Cogan, "Partners in Time,"World Policy Journal, p. 79. "Moral duty" is from Gates, From the Shadows, p. 252. The CIA map produced for Casey is from Gates's unpublished manuscript, pp. 18/63-65.

22. Persico, Casey, p. 313.

23. Interviews with Howard Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001 (SC). His account is corroborated by several other sources, including Yousaf.

24. Memo quotation is from Gates's manuscript, pp. 23/37-38.

25. Interviews with former CIA officials.

26. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 320.

27. Funding numbers and December 6 memo quotations from Gates's manuscript, pp. 23/37-38.

28. That Casey insisted on seeing the border camps is from the author's 1992 interviews with Yousaf. "Kabul must burn!" is from the same interviews. What Casey and Akhtar wore is from a photograph taken during the visit and published in Yousaf, Silent Soldier.

29. Gates's manuscript, pp. 13/6-11.

30. The May 1984 lecture report is quoted in CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Five Years After," May 1985, released by the National Security Archive. That U.S. diplomats traveled to Central Asia is from an interview with Edmund McWilliams, January 15, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). McWilliams was a political officer in the Moscow embassy during this period and traveled to Central Asia several times.

31. Interviews with Yousaf, 1992. Also Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, pp. 189-95.

32. Yousaf 's recollections from the author's 1992 interviews. The Gates quotations are from Gates's manuscript, pp. 26/13-14.

33. Interviews with officials at all three agencies during 1992.

34. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 199.

35. Interviews with U.S. officials. "Not authorize . . . which we did" is from a written communication to the author from Piekney, July 6, 2003.

CHAPTER 6: "WHO IS THIS MASSOUD?"

1. The account of Massoud's childhood and family life is based primarily on a lengthy series of interviews in Kabul in May 2002 with Yahya Massoud, Ahmed Shah's older brother by two years (GW). Yahya also provided a daylong tour of the Panjshir Valley during which he narrated his family's history in the region and discussed his brother's tactics for defending the valley from the Soviets. Throughout the 1980s, Yahya served in Ahmed Shah Massoud's army as an adviser and as a liaison between Massoud and the British intelligence service, MI6. There is a brief account of the young Massoud's war games in Sebastian Junger's 2001 book, Fire, which contains an essay on Massoud titled "The Lion in Winter," p. 213.

2. Interview with Ahmed Wali Massoud, May 7, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

3. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 83, 218, and 221.

4. Interview with Zia Mojadedi, May 14, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Mojadedi was an agriculture professor during the 1960s and 1970s at Kabul University. In 1969, future Afghan leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was among his students. Mojadedi recalls that his student was "highly volatile." For a detailed discussion of the growing chasm between the Islamists and the communists during the 1960s and 1970s in Afghanistan-and particularly at Kabul University-see Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 81-105.

5. Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War, p. 38.

6. This account of the origins of the Muslim Brotherhood and the group's early history is drawn in part from Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt, pp. 26-29, and Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 57-59.

7. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner. Extracts from this book manuscript were published by Al-Sharq al-Awsat; FBIS translation, December 2001. Yasser Arafat was drawn to the Muslim Brotherhood while serving as a young lieutenant in the Egyptian army; he was arrested twice for Brotherhood activities. Later he turned toward secular leftist politics.

8. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 65.

9. Weaver, Portrait of Egypt, pp. 28-29.

10. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 83.

11. Interview with Ali Ashgar Payman, May 7, 2002,Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Payman, a deputy planning minister in the interim government of 2002, was a contemporary of Hekmatyar's at Kabul University.

12. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, pp. 17-18.

13. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 103-4.

14. There are accounts of Massoud's 1978 return to Afghanistan in William Branigin's October 18, 1983, dispatch from the Panjshir for The Washington Post and in Jon Lee Anderson's The Lion's Grave, pp. 218-19.

15. That the Soviets didn't initially intend to use their own troops against the mujahedin is from "The Tragedy and Valor of the Afghani," Moscow, GPI, "Iskon," 1995, pp. 176-77, translated by Svetlana Savran-skaya, National Security Archive.

16. Edward Girardet, The Christian Science Monitor, September 23, 1981. Girardet was the first Western journalist to provide a detailed account of Massoud's war in the Panjshir.

17. Vasiliy Mitrokhin, "The KGB in Afghanistan," p. 134.

18. Sebastian Junger, Fire, p. 201.

19. William Dowell, Time, July 5, 1982. On his way into Afghanistan from Pakistan, Dowell was escorted by a group of Massoud's men. At one point, the mujahedin passed within a few feet of an Afghan army fort. To Dowell's astonishment, instead of opening fire, the soldiers inside the fort waved and smiled.

20. Girardet, Christian Science Monitor, September 24, 1981.

21. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 234-37, describes Massoud's military and civil organization in the Panjshir, especially as it compared to Hekmatyar's organization in Pakistan. The quotations are from Roy, Afghanistan, pp. 63-64.

22. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 220.

23. United Press International, May 24, 1983.

24. Interview with Brig. Gen. Syed Raza Ali (Ret.), ISI, May 20, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC). Raza worked in ISI's Afghan bureau from the early 1980s through the Soviet withdrawal.

25. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 232.

26. Interview with an Arab journalist then in Peshawar.

27. Interview with Graham Fuller, 1992.

28. Interview with a U.S. official.

29. Interview with William Piekney, January 14, 2002, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC).

30. Interview with Abdullah, May 8, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

31. Ibid. The assassination attempt is from The Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 1984, and The Washington Post, May 2, 1984.

32. Patricia I. Sethi, Newsweek, June 11, 1984.

33. Edward Girardet, Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 1984.

34. CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, "The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Five Years After," Secret, May 1985.

35. This summary of Massoud's relations with the British and French is based on interviews with U.S. officials, Yahya Massoud (who handled the liaison with the British), May 2002, and Daoud Mir, who later served as Massoud's representative in France. See also George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, pp. 199-200. Yahya Massoud reported regarding the British, "We had close contact. I can tell you that more than fourteen times I traveled back and forth to the U.K. seeking assistance. They assisted us very well. They gave us very special equipment. They gave us military training-not through Pakistan." The quotations regarding "penis envy" and "trying to find some liberator character" are from an interview with a former CIA officer.

36. Interview with Afghan ambassador to India Massoud Khalili, May 28, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

37. "Playing their own game" is from the interview with Syed Raza Ali, May 20, 2002. That the CIA began unilateral supplies to Massoud in 1984 is from the author's interview with former CIA Near East Division chief Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 202, cites Afghan task force chief Avrakatos and also dates the beginning of CIA aid to late 1984.

38. "He was never a problem" is from an interview with a U.S. official. "He cannot make a man stronger" is from an interview with Mohammed Yousaf, 1992.

39. Girardet, Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 1984.

CHAPTER 7: "THE TERRORISTS WILL OWN THE WORLD"

1. The Anderson quote is from Kirsten Lundberg, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May, "Politics of a Covert Action," Kennedy School of Government Case Program. The account in this chapter about the internal deliberations surrounding NSDD-166 comes from this excellent case study as well as notes and transcripts from the author's original reporting about the decision directive for The Washington Post in July 1992 and more recent interviews by the author with participants.

2. Quotations in this and preceding paragraph are from Lundberg, Zelikow, and May, "Politics of a Covert Action."

3. NSDD-166 and its annex remain classified and have never been published. It remains unclear how specific the original authorizations in the annex were and how many of the new CIA practices evolved under interagency review after the decision directive was signed. In interviews conducted in 1992, Mohammed Yousaf dated the arrival of the first burst communications sets to late 1985. U.S. officials interviewed recently by the author authoritatively date the large-scale expansion of the CIA's unilateral recruitment of paid reporting agents on Afghanistan to 1985. A smaller number of such agents had been on the payroll earlier, according to interviews, but after 1985 the ranks grew to the dozens, and monthly stipends began to swell. It is not clear whether this expansion of unilateral agents was explicitly set in motion by NSDD-166's annex. As to the issue of shooting Soviets, Lundberg, Zelikow, and May, "Politics of a Covert Action," reports that the decision directive "endorsed direct attacks on Soviet military officers," p. 25. The author interviewed multiple participants who remember this issue being discussed at the CIA and by the interagency committee, but those interviews did not make clear whether the decision directive itself endorsed such targeted killings. The interviews underlying the Harvard case study do appear authoritative. George Crile's account of the issue, narrated from the perspective of Avrakatos, does not make clear precisely what legal authorities governed his work.

4. Lundberg, Zelikow, and May, "Politics of a Covert Action," p. 52.

5. Interviews with U.S. officials.

6. Humphrey's recommendation is from the author's interviews in 1992 with multiple U.S. officials involved in the debate over supplying sniper rifles to the mujahedin.

7. Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA, pp. 428-29.

8. The Pillsbury quote is from Lundberg, Zelikow, and May, "Politics of a Covert Action," p. 32. Other details are from the case study and author's interviews with U.S. officials.

9. That the CIA recruited and paid European journalists and travelers to report on Afghanistan is from multiple interviews with U.S. officials, including an interview with Warren Marik, March 11, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). That Haq's relationship with Hart was passed to Piekney is from the author's interviews with U.S. officials. Haq was by now a celebrated and famous commander. President Reagan praised him at a black-tie dinner in Washington, and Haq later met British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Although he was an increasingly outspoken critic of Pakistani intelligence and Hekmatyar, Haq did not openly break with the CIA until 1987.

10. Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 348.

11. "Death by a thousand cuts" is from Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, p. 1.

12. Interviews with Mohammed Yousaf in 1992.

13. Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War, p. 76. The booby trap examples from plastic explosives and "Hidden death" are on pp. 35-36.

14. Quotations in this and the preceding paragraph are from the author's interviews with Yousaf, 1992.

15. Najibullah's elevation to the Politburo is from Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 128. The size of Afghan intelligence service, ibid., p. 133. The location of foreign residencies and penetration of mujahedin headquarters is from Vasiliy Mitrokhin, "The KGB in Afghanistan," pp. 151-56.

16. The use of Spetsnaz tactics and "Omsk vans" is from interviews with U.S. officials in 1992. It is also described in detail in Lund-berg, Zelikow, and May, "Politics of a Covert Action." Helicopter tactics along Pakistani border and that Spetsnaz troops commandeered pickup trucks and operated in disguise are from Timothy Gusinov, a former Soviet military adviser in Afghanistan, writing in The Washington Times, November 3, 2001. The KGB's use of false bands is from Mitrokhin, "The KGB in Afghanistan."

17. Interviews with U.S. officials.

18. That Afghan fighters rejected suicide missions uniformly is from interviews with Yousaf and with Howard Hart, November 12, 26, and 27, 2001, in Virginia (SC), and other U.S. officials.

19. "Most likely use" is from an interview with a U.S. official in 1992, addressing the specific question of sniper rifles, detonator packages, and other "dual use" covert supplies. "These aren't terrorist . . . ever again" is from George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, p. 166. "Do I want . . . spreads fear," ibid., p. 318. Endorsed reward for belt buckles, ibid., p. 350.

20. The Vaughan Forrest quotation is from a telephone interview with Forrest, 1992. "Shooting ducks" and "off Russian generals" are from an interview with a participant in the debates, 1992.

21. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials involved with the sniper rifle debate, 1992, as well as interviews with Yousaf, 1992, who received the guns and implemented the training.

22. Statistics about Americans abroad in 1985 are from Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, p. 150. Habash's quotation from 1970 is also cited in Hoffman, pp. 70-71. He dates Jenkins's seminal formulations to his article "International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict," in David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf, eds., International Terrorism and World Security .

23. "The incidents would become" is from Duane R. Clarridge, with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons, p. 320. The account of the Counterterrorist Center's birth, the memo, and the quotations in the following five paragraphs are from Clarridge, ibid., pp. 320-29, and from an interview with Clarridge, December 28, 2001, San Diego, California (SC).

24. A partially declassified version of NSDD-207 has been obtained and published by the National Security Archive.

25. "Pretty much anything he wanted" is from Robert Baer, See No Evil, pp. 84-85. "Hit teams" is from the author's interview with Clarridge, December 28, 2001.

26. Interview with Robert Gates, March 12, 2002, Cleveland, Ohio (SC).

27. The Baer quotation is from Baer, See No Evil, pp. 84-85. The Cannistraro quotation is from the author's interview with Vincent Cannistraro, January 8, 2002, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC).

28. The use of beacons in planted weapons is from an interview with Clarridge, December 28, 2001.

29. That the CIA had no sources in Hezbollah and "absolutely no idea" where the hostages were is from Baer, See No Evil,pp. 86-92. That the Counterterrorist Center was inundated with hoaxes, some mounted by Hezbollah, is from the interview with Cannistraro, January 8, 2002.

30. The trucks and the development of the operation with Delta Force are from the interview with Clarridge, December 28, 2001.

31. The account of the Eagle Program, the prototypes, the effort to equip them with cameras, explosives, and rockets is from the interview with Clarridge, December 28, 2001.

32. Clarridge, with Diehl, Spy for All Seasons, p. 339.

33. Interview with Yousaf, 1992.

34. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, p. 41.

35. Counterterrorist branches and priorities are from interviews with Clarridge, December 28, 2001; Cannistraro, January 8, 2002; and Stanley Bedington, a senior analyst at the center from its founding, November 19, 2001, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC).

36. Interview with Clarridge, December 28, 2001.

37. Bedington's recollection that bin Laden's activities were first reported in CIA cables around 1985 is supported by an unclassified profile of bin Laden released by the agency in 1996. Drawing on agency reporting, the profile says, "By 1985, Bin Laden had drawn on his family's wealth, plus donations received from sympathetic merchant families in the Gulf region, to organize the Islamic Salvation Front. . . ."

38. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 349.

CHAPTER 8: "INSHALLAH, YOU WILL KNOW MY PLANS"

1. Interview with Milton Bearden, November 15, 2001, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC). "I want you to go out there and win" is from Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 214.

2. "Uncle Milty" is from Robert Baer, See No Evil, p. 142. Other quotations and anecdotes are from interviews with U.S. officials.

3. Interview with Milton Bearden, March 25, 2002, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC).

4. Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 429.

5. Published accounts of the first Stinger shot include Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, pp. 175-76, and Milton Bearden, "Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires," Foreign Affairs, pp. 21-22. Also Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy,pp. 248-52. The incoming cable quoted is from Bearden and Risen. That the attack was recorded by a KH-11 is from interviews with U.S. officials. The Bearden quote describing the video is from the interview, November 15, 2001, and Bearden and Risen, MainEnemy, p. 252. That Reagan screened biopics of foreign visitors is from Bob Woodward, Veil, p. 249. George Crile, in Charlie Wilson's War, argues that the crucial groundwork for the introduction of the Stinger was laid by Wilson and his supporters.

6. Cable quoted by Gates, From the Shadows, p. 430.

7. This account of the CIA's agent network is from the author's interviews with three former and current U.S. officials. Interviews conducted by the author with British officials in 1992 also described their liaison with Massoud but provided no dates. The British liaison appears to have begun very early in the war. According to still-classified records of the Afghan covert action program, the CIA received authority to expand its unilateral agent network after NSDD-166 was signed in March 1985, but the Islamabad station would have had standing authority to recruit some agents earlier for routine espionage purposes. That CIA assistance to Massoud began in 1984, see note 37 of chapter 6.

8. Interviews with U.S. officials.

9. Ibid.

10. Interview with Bearden, November 15, 2001.

11. That bin Laden's house was in the University Town section of Peshawar is from Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 56. The description of the neighborhood is from the author's visits.

12. Quotations and dates are from al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner . The English version is from the FBIS translation. The manuscript appeared to represent an effort by al-Zawahiri to publish a personal memoir and political manifesto before he was captured or killed by U.S. or coalition forces in Afghanistan. Some of the recollections in the manuscript may be constructed to promote al-Zawahiri's contemporary political agenda, but many of the dates and details of the political and theological arguments he writes about are consistent with other accounts.

13. Azzam's biography details are from Nida'ul Islam, July-September 1996, and interviews with Arab journalists and activists who asked not to be further identified. See also Bergen, Holy War, pp. 51-54; Roy, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War, p. 85; Mary Anne Weaver, The New Yorker, January 24, 2000. That the Tucson office opened in 1986 is from Judith Miller and Dale Van Natta, The New York Times, June 9, 2002.

14. The Gates quotation is from Gates, From the Shadows, p. 349. "We should try . . . see them as the enemy" is from an interview with a U.S. official. "Actually did some very good things . . . anti-American" is from Bearden's interview with Frontline, "Hunting Bin Laden," March 21, 2000. The description of how the issue was viewed and debated within the U.S. intelligence community is from interviews with former U.S. officials.

15. The account here and following of debates between bin Laden, Azzam, and other Arabs in Peshawar is drawn primarily from interviews with Arab journalists and activists who were in Peshawar at the time. Prince Turki described bin Laden's relationship with Azzam and al-Zawahiri in similar terms in an interview on August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico: "Bin Laden, I think, liked very much Abdullah Azzam . . . and was taken by the man's eloquence and personality." Published accounts of the debates among Peshawar Arab activists during this period include The New York Times, January 14, 2001.

16. "A place steeped in cussedness" is from an interview with Peter Tomsen, former special envoy to the Afghan resistance, May 8, 2003, Washington, D.C. (SC). "Know my plans" is from an interview with an Arab activist who was in Peshawar at the time.

17. Published accounts of the November 13, 1986, Politburo meeting on Afghanistan, citing Politburo archives, include Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post, November 16, 1992. Gates describes the same meeting in less detail in From the Shadows, p. 430. The quotations here are from English translations of Politburo records provided by Anatoly Chenyaev of the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow to the Cold War International History Project, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

18. U.S. officials interviewed by the author in 1992 described the VEIL intelligence as a significant factor in the decision to push the escalation ratified by NSDD-166. The intelligence reporting is described in detail in the case study "Politics of a Covert Action" by Kirsten Lundberg, Philip Zelikow, and Ernest May, Harvard University, 1999.

19. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 386.

20. Quotations are from "The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan," Directorate of Intelligence, CIA, Office of Soviet Analysis; originally classified Secret, February 1987. Published by National Security Archive; released by the CIA. Sanitized and declassified version, 2000, CIA Special Collections. "It still looked as though" is from Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 217.

21. Gorbachev's meetings and conversations are from archives and Politburo documents translated into English by the Gorbachev Foundation, provided by Anatoly Chenyaev to the Cold War International History Project, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

22. Ibid.

23. All quotations about Casey's seizure and hospital discussions are from Joseph E. Persico, Casey: From the OSS to the CIA, pp. 551-57.

24. Details about the three commando teams are from Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, pp. 200-205, and from interviews with Yousaf in 1992. The satellite photos of Kazakhstan riots are from Gates, From the Shadows, p. 385.

25. Bearden's conversation with Clair George is from interviews with U.S. officials and from Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, pp. 290-91. Bearden's call to Yousaf is from Yousaf and Adkin, Bear Trap, p. 205. In his memoir Bearden is careful to absolve Casey from all knowledge of the attacks on Soviet soil. According to Bearden, when he first went out to Islamabad, Clair George told him that Casey had plans to make propaganda radio broadcasts into Soviet Central Asia and that this idea faced resistance from the State Department. In his memoir Bearden blames Yousaf for the attacks. The involvement of Akhtar, then head of Pakistani intelligence, "remained in doubt."

26. Milton Bearden, "Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires"; Bergen, Holy War, p. 57, citing in part translations of a slim biographical portrait of bin Laden in Arabic first published in 1991.

27. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, FBIS translation.

28. Quotations are from Arab journalists and from activists.

29. "Up to $25 million per month" is an estimate from Bearden in "Afghanistan." The question of which of the Afghan mujahedin parties received what percentage of ISI weapons was debated at great length during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hamid Gul, Yousaf, and more than half a dozen U.S. officials directly involved all asserted that by the late 1980s, ISI and the CIA operated the pipeline by a rough rule of thumb: Hekmatyar received about 20 to 25 percent; Rabbani a similar amount; Younis Khalis and Sayyaf somewhat less. The three "moderate" factions recognized by ISI received 10 percent or less each. After 1987, ISI moved with CIA encouragement toward a system of "operational packaging" in which commanders, rather than political leaders, sometimes received weapons directly. What do all these statistics and supply system variations add up to? By all accounts the four main Islamists in the resistance-Hekmatyar, Rabbani, Khalis, and Sayyaf-received the greatest share of the official ISI-CIA-GID supply line. Hekmatyar himself probably did not receive as much raw material as the CIA's critics sometimes asserted, although he and Sayyaf clearly had the most access to private Arab funding and supplies, and Hekmatyar received preferential treatment by ISI's Afghan bureau for training and operations, especially after 1989. No detailed statistics about the CIA's covert supplies have ever been formally published by the U.S. government.

30. Interviews with U.S. officials, including former congressional aides who made visits to Pakistan while Bearden was station chief.

31. Interviews with U.S. officials familiar with ISI's Afghan bureau during this period.

32. Bearden's dialogue with Hekmatyar is from Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, pp. 282-83. Anderson, "a pretty good commander . . . as many scalps" and Bearden, "much, much more time . . . very angry with me," are from Afghan Warrior: The Life and Death of Abdul Haq, a film by Touch Productions broadcast by the BBC, 2003. In his memoir, Bearden recalls his dialogue with Hekmatyar as confrontational and unyielding. The author has heard another account of their meetings from a well-informed U.S. official. This version supports Bearden's published account but is slightly different in tone. In this version Bearden tells Hekmatyar, "You don't like me, and I don't like you. I'm accused of giving you the lion's share. I wouldn't give you a fucking thing, but you've got commanders that are good." Hekmatyar replies, "I didn't say I didn't like you."

33. The English translations are from Politburo records provided by Anatoly Chenyaev of the Gorbachev Foundation to the Cold War International History Project.

34. Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan, pp. 83-84, partially quoting Shultz's memoirs.

35. Interview with Gates, March 12, 2002, Cleveland, Ohio (SC).

36. Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 424-25.

37. Archives and Politburo documents, from Anatoly Chenyaev of the Gorbachev Foundation, Cold War International History Project.

38. Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 430-31.

CHAPTER 9: "WE WON"

1. Biography details and quotation are from interviews with Edmund McWilliams, January 15 and February 26, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

2. The cable, "From Amembassy Kabul to Secstate WashDC," January 15, 1988, is in the author's files.

3. Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows, pp. 431-32.

4. Director of Central Intelligence, "USSR: Withdrawal from Afghanistan," Special National Intelligence Estimate, March 1988, originally classified Secret; published by National Security Archive, Washington, D.C.

5. Interview with Milton Bearden, November 15, 2001, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC).

6. The Gul quotation is from an interview with Gul, May 23, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC). The Defense Intelligence Agency profile was declassified and provided to the author in 1992. That Gul was close to Saudi intelligence then and later is from the author's interviews with Ahmed Badeeb and Saeed Badeeb, February 1, 2002, Jedda, Saudi Arabia (SC). That Americans thought he was sympathetic is from interviews with U.S. officials at the Islamabad embassy between 1989 and 1992. "Moderate Islamist" is from Milt Bearden and James Risen, The Main Enemy, p. 292.

7. Interview with Gul, May 23, 2002. Bearden, "only real strength . . . strayed into Afghanistan," is from Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, pp. 235 and 238. Bearden's support for sending high-tech weapons to eastern Afghanistan, ibid., pp. 278-79.

8. Original interview with Sig Harrison published in Le Monde Diplomatique and quoted in Charles G. Cogan, "Shawl of Lead," Conflict.

9. Interviews with Milton Bearden, March 25, 2002, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC).

10. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, p. 170.

11. Interviews with Bearden, March 25, 2002, and other U.S. and Pakistani officials. "Tell them not" is from the interview with Bearden. "Big-chested homecoming . . . Arizona plates" is from Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 345.

12. Interviews with U.S. officials. Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, pp. 350-51.

13. Interview with Robert Oakley, February 15, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

14. Ibid. See also Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 292.

15. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, p. 89, citing an intelligence report presented to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1992.

16. Who McWilliams saw and what they told him are from interviews with McWilliams, January 15, 2002.

17. Barnett R. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 249.

18. Interviews with U.S. officials.

19. Interviews with Yahya Massoud, May 9 and 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

20. Cable in author's files. "For God's sake" is from an interview with Hamid Gailani, May 14, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

21. Interview with McWilliams, January 15, 2002.

22. The account of the embassy's reactions and the controversy over the earlier episode in Kabul are from interviews with several U.S. officials, including McWilliams, on January 15, 2002. The internal investigation described two paragraphs later is from McWilliams. Bearden's quoted views about Massoud are from Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, p. 279. That Bearden saw Hekmatyar as "an enemy," ibid., p. 283. In his memoir Bearden not only describes Hekmatyar "as an enemy, and a dangerous one," but he also discounts "allegations that the CIA had chosen this paranoid radical as its favorite." But the record shows no evidence of CIA pressure on Hekmatyar during this period, and other U.S. officials say that CIA records from these months show a persistent defense of Hekmatyar by the agency.

23. Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War, pp. 161-62. KGB chief 's tennis, ibid., p. 242. Polish ambassador, ibid., p. 239. Officer reading from book about 1904 Japan war, ibid., p. 233. Gromov on Massoud, ibid., p. 246. Last fatality, ibid., p. 278.

24. Bearden, "Afghanistan, Graveyard of Empires," Foreign Affairs, pp. 22-23.

25. Interview with Bearden, November 15, 2001. Also Bearden and Risen, Main Enemy, pp. 358-59.

26. From Robert Gates's unpublished original manuscript, p. 31/20, quoting Shevardnadze's memoir.

CHAPTER 10: "SERIOUS RISKS"

1. The account of two stations inside the embassy and the details of payments to Afghan commanders are from interviews with U.S. officials.

2. Multiple published accounts of the failed attack on Jalalabad describe the role of ISI, discussions within the Pakistani government, and the problems of the Afghan interim government. See Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, pp. 298-99; Mohammed Yousaf and Mark Adkin, The Bear Trap, pp. 227-31; Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 250; and Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War, p. 72. As Roy writes, "The Pakistani soldiers who pressed the guerrillas to join the conventional war in 1989 looked on Afghanistan as a 'headquarters operations map' upon which one moves little blue, red and green flags over a space where units are interchangeable and objectives quantifiable. As seen by Afghans, this was [a space] of tribes, ethnic groups, zones of influence of one chief or another."

3. The figure of "about $25 million" is from Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan; he quotes U.S. diplomats citing reports that Saudi intelligence spent $26 million. The Gul quote is from the author's interview with Hamid Gul during 1992.

4. The characterizations here and in preceding paragraphs are drawn from interviews with Robert Oakley, February 15, 2002,Washington,D.C. (SC); Benazir Bhutto, May 5, 2002, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (GW); Mirza Aslam Beg, May 23, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC); and Hamid Gul, May 23, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC); as well as with other U.S. officials and Pakistani officers. The conversation between Bhutto and Akhund, "I wonder if . . . turn out" is from Iqbal Akhund, Trial and Error, p. 38.

5. "Not some Johnnies" and "prepared to allow" are from Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 298. "Eyes blazing with passion" and "one week" are from the interview with Bhutto, May 5, 2002. "There can be no ceasefire . . . becomes Darul Amn" is from Akhund, Trial and Error, p. 177. In his memoir Bearden writes that he traveled through the Khyber Agency during the Jalalabad siege and found the battle "a halfhearted effort that senselessly piled up casualties on both sides." Milt Bearden and James Risen,The Main Enemy, p. 362. Bearden also writes that as he left Pakistan that summer, he presented Hamid Gul with a U.S. cavalry sword and tried to help Gul choose a university in America for his oldest son to attend. Some years later, Bearden acknowledges, "the CIA would describe the plucky little general as 'the most dangerous man in Pakistan.' And that, too, would be right." Ibid., p. 367.

6. Information on the Sarobi plan, the Peshawar meeting, and the truck supplies are from interviews with U.S. officials.

7. Interview with Gary Schroen, July 31, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC).

8. The estimate of the dollar value of Soviet monthly aid during this period is from Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 70.

9. CIA Stinger and sludge operations are from interviews with U.S. officials.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid. Some U.S. officials interviewed referred to the Bush administration's renewed finding as "the bridge finding," meaning that it bridged U.S. covert policy from the Soviet occupation period, now ended, with the final defeat of Najibullah, a Soviet client. Besides setting Afghan "self-determination" as an objective of CIA covert action, the Bush finding also set out humanitarian objectives for U.S. policy, as NSDD-166 had done earlier. These included the voluntary return of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and Iran. The full scope of this finding is not known, but it seems to have been a fairly modest revision of Reaganera objectives, undertaken mainly to account for the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

12. Interview with Edmund McWilliams, January 15, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

13. "To SecState WashDC Priority, Dissent Channel," June 21, 1989.

14. While reporting in Pakistan during this period, and later in London, the author heard this argument repeatedly from British diplomats and intelligence officers involved in the Afghan program.

15. "Just because a few white guys" is from a written communication from Milton Bearden to the author, July 5, 2003.

16. The characterization of the view of CIA officers is from interviews with Milton Bearden, November 15, 2001, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC), and several other U.S. officials.

17. Oakley said that his "problem with McWilliams" was that McWilliams had a naïve, unrealistic desire to change U.S. policy that had been endorsed by the White House. By 1991, Oakley's own views seem to have shifted more in McWilliams's direction, but by then McWilliams was long gone from the embassy.

18. Letter from McWilliams to Oakley, July 23, 1989.

19. Interviews with U.S. officials.

20. The account of the Anderson-Bearden trip is from interviews with several U.S. officials, including Bearden, March 25, 2002, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC). Bearden later wrote and published a novel in 1998, Black Tulip: A Novel of War in Afghanistan, based on his tour as station chief in Islamabad. Bearden's fictional hero, Alexander, has a close encounter with a group of Algerian volunteers in the same eastern area of Afghanistan. In the novel Bearden writes a fantasy of revenge. An anti-Arab Afghan mujahedin commander lures the Algerians to a feast around a campfire and supplies a goat with "two claymore mines packed neatly inside the chest cavity." Most of the Algerians are killed when the mines detonate, and a survivor is tortured and killed by Afghans.

21. Interviews with U.S. officials.

22. Ibid.

23. Richard MacKenzie, reporting for The Washington Times, broke the story of the massacre on July 11, 1989, to the author's chagrin. See also Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 250-51.

24. Interview with an Arab activist familiar with Azzam's visit with Massoud that summer. Olivier Roy, Afghanistan: From Holy War to Civil War, p. 86, also describes Azzam's journey that summer. So did Daoud Mir, an aide to Massoud, in interviews, July 31 and August 8, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW). That Azzam compared Massoud to Napoleon is from Mir interviews. After meeting with Massoud, Roy writes, Azzam "endeavored to strike a balanced attitude" between Massoud and Hekmatyar.

25. The summary of the debates is drawn largely from interviews with two Arab participants. Al-Zawahiri's published writings make clear where he and bin Laden stood on theological questions.

26. Azzam is quoted by his son-in-law, Abdullah Anas, in The New York Times, January 14, 2001.

27. Multiple published accounts, including from Anas, ibid., describe a split among the Arab volunteers then in Peshawar after Azzam's death, and most accounts date to this period of bin Laden's emergence as the new head of al Qaeda, as he called the successor organizaton of Azzam's Office of Services. But the sequence of this split and takeover remains unclear. American intelligence dates al Qaeda's founding to 1988. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 60, quotes the British military journalist and inveterate Afghan traveler Peter Jouvenal as seeing bin Laden rebuilding his base in Jaji in February 1989, months before Azzam's murder. "I witnessed them digging huge caves, using explosives and Caterpillar digging equipment," Jouvenal said. At the same time multiple accounts, including from the chief of staff of Saudi intelligence, Ahmed Badeeb, describe bin Laden leaving Pakistan with his family at some point during 1989 for his home in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. By late 1990, bin Laden is clearly back in Jedda, fomenting jihad in South Yemen. How all of these movements and activities by bin Laden overlap with the takeover and rebirth of al Qaeda under his leadership is not fully clear.

CHAPTER 11: "A ROGUE ELEPHANT"

1. Interviews with U.S. officials. Interview with Peter Tomsen, January 21, 2002, Omaha, Nebraska (SC). Also "Special Envoy to the Afghanistan Resistance," State Department action memorandum, April 19, 1989, declassified and released, March 23, 2000.

2. Interview with Tomsen, January 21, 2002, and with other U.S. officials.

3. Ibid. The CIA was under pressure from mujahedin supporters in Congress because of complaints from Afghan commanders about a sharp slowdown in weapons supplies. A Chinese factory dedicated to making rockets for Pakistani intelligence had burned down, and a major weapons depot in Rawalpindi had been destroyed, either by accident or sabotage. As a result, large shipments to Pakistan had been delayed at a time when the carnage at Jalalabad was draining ordnance supplies.

4. The author has seen a copy of the document.

5. The account of the shift in U.S. policy is drawn primarily from interviews with U.S. officials, including Tomsen, January 21, 2002. The policy is outlined in State Department cables from late 1989 and early 1990 that were reviewed by the author. Tomsen began to discuss his plans for the commanders' shura publicly in early 1990. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 247-80, provides a detailed, carefully reported account of Afghan political-military developments and U.S. policy gyrations during this period.

6. Tomsen's travel to Pakistan, briefings to officials, and arguments with Harry are from interviews with U.S. officials. Harry: "Coming back" and "Why are you so anti-Hekmatyar?" are from interviews with U.S. officials. Twetten had participated in the interagency meeting and had signed off on the new policy on behalf of the CIA, according to Tomsen. He and others at the State Department saw the CIA's reversal as an effort to appease Pakistani intelligence, which was upset by the new policy direction.

7. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

8. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 261-62.

9. The account in this chapter of the CIA's role in the winter offensive of 1989-90, including the details of the agency's payments to Massoud, are from interviews with U.S. officials.

10. That CIA unilateral agents reported to Islamabad that bin Laden was funding a Hekmatyar coup attempt is from interviews with U.S. officials.

11. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 253. The author was in Pakistan at the time of the coup attempt and interviewed Pakistani, American, and, later, Afghan government officials and military officers about the events.

12. That the CIA had reports at the time that bin Laden had funded the Tanai coup attempt is from interviews with U.S. officials. The agency had sources among Afghan commanders and within Pakistani intelligence at the time, but it is not clear exactly where the reports about bin Laden's role came from.

13. Interview with Benazir Bhutto, May 5, 2002, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (GW). The no-confidence vote against Bhutto failed, but the army did forcibly remove her from office nine months later. According to Oakley, the American embassy in Islamabad concluded that Pakistani intelligence participated that winter and spring in conspiracies aimed at ousting Bhutto from power. Interview with Robert Oakley, February 15, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

14. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 253, cites reports that funding for the Tanai coup attempt came from "ISI and Saudi intelligence."

15. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002. Twetten said he had no recollection of any "piece of paper" coming into Langley from the Islamabad station providing advanced word or planning about the Tanai coup, and he felt certain that he would remember that "if they had told us" about the coup attempt. "They never were honest with us on Hekmatyar," Twetten said. "When we insisted, they would arrange for a meeting with Hekmatyar, but it wasn't very often and it wasn't very productive, even in the best of times."

16. Interviews with U.S. officials. While serving as ambassador to the Afghan resistance, Tomsen met with Prince Turki seventeen times.

17. Interviews with Saudi officials.

18. The meeting of Massoud's representative Prince Bandar and Turki's funding for the commanders' shura are from interviews with U.S. officials and an aide to Massoud.

19. Funding levels and estimates of private Gulf money are from Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 182.

20. Gorbachev Foundation, documents presented at "Towards an International History of Afghanistan," Cold War International History Project, Washington, D.C.

21. Interviews with U.S. officials.

22. That the CIA reported on the trucks rolling to arm Hekmatyar is from interviews with U.S. officials. Tomsen's meeting and the quotations from the cable to Washington: "SE Tomsen Meeting with Shura of Commanders Oct. 6," cable dated October 10, 1990, author's files.

23. Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan, p. 115, and interview with Tomsen, January 21, 2002. Lunch meeting between Tomsen and Harry is from interviews with U.S. officials. "Not only a horribly bad . . . Afghan political context," ibid.

24. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 254. Rubin, Search for Peace, p. 121.

25. The meeting between Turki and Massoud's representatives is from an interview with Daoud Mir, July 31, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW). Mir recalled that when he finally met Turki at a palace in Jedda, he began complaining vociferously that Saudi intelligence had misunderstood Massoud for many years. He talked, he recalled, until a frustrated Turki covered his ears with his hands, indicating that he had heard enough.

26. The increase in Massoud's stipend and the struggle to ship weapons to the Panjshir are from interviews with U.S. officials.

27. "Sore on our backside" is from an interview with Maj. Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani (Ret.), May 20, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC).

28. Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, p. 309.

29. Interview with Robert Oakley, February 15, 2002.

30. While traveling in Kashmir during this period, the author met with Kashmiri Islamist guerrillas who talked of their training in Afghanistan and displayed weapons clearly manufactured in China. The warning to Indian officials about sniper rifles is from interviews with U.S. officials in India during 1991.

31. Ahmed Badeeb interview with Orbit satellite network, early 2002; translated from original Arabic. See note 1 of chapter 4.

32. Ibid.

33. This account of bin Laden's meeting with Khalil and the senior prince is from an interview with Khalil A. Khalil, January 29, 2002, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (SC). Khalil declined to identify the prince by name but said that "King Fahd is his direct uncle." This may have been Prince Turki.

34. Douglas Jehl, The New York Times, December 27, 2001.

35. Prince Turki, MBC television and Arab News, November 7, 2001. In an interview with ABC's Nightline on December 10, 2001, Turki cited bin Laden's proposals to lead an anti-Iraqi jihad as "the first signs of a disturbed mind, in my view." The implication is that Turki was untroubled by bin Laden prior to the autumn of 1990.

36. "Whereas before . . . as well as beyond" is from the memo "Démarche to Pakistan on Hekmatyar and Sayyaf Gulf Statements," January 28, 1991; excised and released April 6, 2000. The memo urges a "strong approach to the GOP [Government of Pakistan], preferably by both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia," and also urges making the same points to Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Badeeb's trip is from an interview with Ahmed Badeeb, February 1, 2002, Jedda, Saudi Arabia (SC).

CHAPTER 12: "WE ARE IN DANGER"

1. The account in this chapter of the CIA covert action program to ship captured Iraqi armor, artillery, and other equipment to Pakistan for the Afghan rebels is drawn from interviews with multiple U.S. and Saudi officials. While working as a correspondent in Pakistan and Kabul, the author also reported on the program a few months after it began. Steve Coll,Washington Post, October 1, 1991.

2. Interviews with U.S. officials, including Peter Tomsen, January 21, 2002, Omaha, Nebraska (SC).

3. Charles Cogan, former chief of the Near East Division in the Directorate of Operations, wrote in 1990 that the Tanai coup "revealed, once again, that Gulbuddin, whatever his negative public image, leaves the other resistance leaders far behind in terms of tactics and maneuvering." Cogan acknowledged, however, that this "still did not make Gulbuddin a credible alternative to Najibullah." Not all of his former colleagues at the CIA accepted the second point. See Charles G. Cogan, "Shawl of Lead," Conflict, p. 197.

4. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 255.

5. This account of CIA and State Department reporting about Arab radicals is from interviews with U.S. officials.

6. Interview with Milt Bearden, March 25, 2002, Tysons Corner, Virginia (SC).

7. "It is not the world" is from Joshua Tei-telbaum, Holier Than Thou, p. 30. "Crusaders," ibid., p. 29. "Member of the establishment . . . against the regime" is from Frontline, "Hunting bin Laden," March 21, 2000. Mary Anne Weaver in The New Yorker,January 24, 2000, sees bin Laden increasingly "under the sway" of Hawali and another "awakening sheikh," Salman Awdah, during this period.

8. Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 32-36.

9. The spending of the Ministry of Pilgrimage and Religious Trusts and numbers of religious employees are from Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, p. 101. Fahd's offer of free Korans is from Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, p. 473. Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud algaisal traveled to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan within weeks of the Soviet Union's formal dissolution early in 1992, opening Saudi embassies in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Saud emphasized that Islam provided the foundation for Saudi relations in the Central Asian region. See Saleh al-Khatlan, "Saudi Foreign Policy Toward Central Asia," Journal of King Abdulaziz University, 2000.

10. Interviews with U.S. officials. Schroen's exchange with Prince Turki from interview with Gary Schroen, July 31, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC).

11. Interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC).

12. Interviews with U.S. officials. That Hekmatyar, Sayyaf, and Haqqanni had offices in Saudi Arabia for mosque fund-raising is from written communication to the author from Peter Tomsen, May 3, 2003.

13. The account of the Saudi escort telling bin Laden that the Americans were out to kill him is from an interview with Vincent Cannistraro, January 8, 2002, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC). Cannistraro was chief of operations and analysis at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center during this period. He said the account had been provided to him by a longtime Saudi intelligence officer directly involved. A New York Times account published on January 14, 2001, based on extensive interviews with U.S. and Arab sources, reported that bin Laden later told "associates" that Saudi Arabia had hired the Pakistani intelligence service to kill him, although there was no evidence, the Times story said, that such a plot ever existed. There are various published accounts of bin Laden's forced departure from Saudi Arabia, which is generally dated to mid-1991, around the time of the Letter of Demands controversy within the kingdom. The former U.S. counterterrorism officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon report that bin Laden first traveled to Afghanistan, then to Sudan. See their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 110. Other accounts have him traveling initially to Pakistan. Peter L. Bergen, in Holy War, Inc., p. 29, quotes trial testimony by former associates reporting that bin Laden arrived in Sudan with family and followers in his personal jet. For the interrogation statements of two bin Laden associates, see National Commission final report, p. 57.

14. Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, pp. 266-67.

15. Peter Tomsen, "An extremist seizure," is from "Afghan Policy-U.S. Strategy," September 26, 1991, excised and declassified March 23, 2000, author's files. "Scramble for power" is from "Afghanistan: Trends for 1992," December 16, 1991, excised and declassified March 23, 2000, author's files. Charles Cogan, reflecting a widely held outlook at the CIA, wrote in 1993 that "the partnership, if you will, between the United States and the Afghan resistance was of limited duration and could only have been so. The long-range aims of a country in which Islamists were at last beginning to have a say would not be, could not be, wholly compatible with the aims of a Western nation."

16. Interview with a U.S. official. The estimate of the number of tanks is uncertain. ISI officers interviewed by the author acknowledged being pressed by the CIA to destroy leftover Afghan equipment.

17. Interview with Edmund McWilliams, February 26, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC) The size of Dostum's militia is from Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 270. Rubin provides a definitive account of the internal collapse of the Najibullah regime and the fruitless negotiations by the United Nations early in 1992.

18. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 5, quoting the International Herald Tribune .

19. The account of Hekmatyar's operations at Charasyab in April 1992 is drawn largely from an interview with an Arab journalist who was there. The author was in Kabul at the time and heard similar accounts from travelers in the region. The author visited Charasyab in 2002. Abdullah Anis, the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam, an Algerian Islamist activist who was close to Massoud, has also published an account of the Massoud-Hekmatyar negotiations. His recollections of the radio exchange from Massoud's side are similar to those of the Arab journalist in Charasyab.

20. Interview with an Arab journalist then with Hekmatyar. Prince Turki has also acknowledged that bin Laden was in Peshawar at the time and participated in the peace talks. Turki told the Arab television network MBC on November 7, 2001, speaking of bin Laden, "He went there to work with other Islamic personalities who were trying to reconcile the Afghan mujahedin, who differed on the setting up of a government. I saw him among those personalities."

21. William Maley, "Interpreting the Taliban," in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 9.

22. The author was in Kabul at the time and watched Massoud's forces rout Hekmatyar over several days of intensive street fighting.

23. Interview with Yahya Massoud, May 9, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

24. Personal weapons: Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. 196. Estimates of total outside aid: Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 99.

25. Abdul Haq's letter to Tomsen is from Afghan Warrior: The Life and Death of Abdul Haq, Touch Productions, aired by the BBC, 2003. Tomsen memos: "Afghanistan-U.S. Interests and U.S. Aid," December 18, 1992, excised and declassified April 4, 2000, author's files; and "Central Asia, Afghanistan and U.S. Policy," February 2, 1993, excised and declassified March 23, 2000, author's files.

CHAPTER 13: "A FRIEND OF YOUR ENEMY"

1. "The heartbreak" is from Associated Press, June 17, 1992. "141 words" and "very much apart" are from David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, pp. 193 and 22. "A small blip" is from an interview with Anthony Lake, May 5, 2003, Washington, D.C. (GW).

2. "The biggest nuclear threat" is from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 27, 1991. "Strong special operations" is from The Boston Globe, February 2, 1992.

3. It had not been a major issue: Interview with Lake, May 5, 2003. Clinton's views about terrorism and Afghanistan are from interviews with senior U.S. officials close to the president.

4. Interview with Robert Gates, March 12, 2002, Cleveland, Ohio (SC).

5. Woolsey's trip to Little Rock and that he had met Clinton only once are from an interview with James Woolsey, February 20, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). His antiwar activities and professional history are from Michael Gordon, The New York Times, January 11, 1993.

6. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002.

7. Ibid. For a similar account of this scene, see Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, p. 192.

8. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

9. What Clarridge concluded is from an interview with Duane Clarridge, December 28, 2001, Escondido, California (SC).

10. How Woolsey was perceived at the White House is from interviews with Clinton administration officials.

11. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002.

12. Interviews with Clinton administration officials.

13. Kasi's background is from John Ward Anderson and Kamran Khan, The Washington Post, February 17, 1993. "Something big" is from Patricia Davis, The Washington Post, November 14, 2002.

14. Davis, The Washington Post, November 14, 2002. See also the Post coverage of the shootings by Bill Miller, Patricia Davis, D'Vera Cohn, Robert O'Harrow Jr., and Steve Bates, January 26, 1993.

15. The core source of nearly all published biographies of Yousef is the FBI witness statement produced from handwritten notes by FBI special agent Charles B. Stern and United States Secret Service officer Brian G. Parr. The notes were taken during their six-hour conversation with Yousef while flying back to the United States from Pakistan on February 7 and 8, 1995. According to Parr's testimony at Yousef 's trial, Yousef refused to allow them to take notes while they spoke in a makeshift interview room at the back of the plane, so Stern and Parr each got up periodically and took summary notes out of Yousef 's sight, in another part of the plane. The notes were dictated on February 9. The details about his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his great-uncle, Mohammed's father, are from Finn et al., The Washington Post, March 9, 2003.

16. During one of his FBI interviews, Yousef acknowledged that after the World Trade Center bombing, while he was a fugitive, his parents knew that he was responsible for the attack and on the run from American authorities. Yousef said that his parents had moved to Iran. Certainly they would have been safer there than in Pakistan, less vulnerable to police or government pressure. While in Iran, Yousef said, his parents received a phone call from a woman purporting to be from an American phone company who was looking to locate Yousef about a billing issue. Yousef told the story to indicate that he and his parents had assumed the caller was from the FBI and that they had dodged the inquiry.

17. Yousef complained repeatedly during his interviews with the FBI about his lack of funds. He said that he had "borrowed" money from friends in Peshawar who did not know about his plans. The World Trade Center attack was a threadbare operation in many respects. Yousef, however, was able to purchase a first-class ticket to Pakistan when he made his escape after the bombing.

18. "Attack a friend" is from the statement by FBI special agent Stern and Secret Service officer Parr, February 7 and 8. They placed the phrase in quotes.

19. A photocopy of the letter was introduced as evidence at Yousef 's trial. The brief narrative of the attack is from transcripts of opening statements delivered at the trial.

20. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 13. The authors were counterterrorism officials at the National Security Council during Clinton's second term.

21. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002; interview with Stanley Bedington, senior intelligence analyst at the Counterterrorist Center during this period, November 19, 2001, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC); and interviews with other U.S. officials.

22. That the personal histories of Yousef and Kasi were murky and that Iranian-sponsored terrorism "was the priority" are from the interview with Lake, May 5, 2003. "Sudafed" is from the interview with Bedington, November 19, 2001.

23. This account of the center's budgetary pressures is from interviews with U.S. officials. By this account the pressure eased after 1996 when domestic terrorist attacks led Congress to open its purse for counterterrorism programs governmentwide. Since the September 11 attacks there have been contradictory assertions about how aggressively counterterrorism efforts were funded by Clinton and Congress. Benjamin and Simon assert, for instance, that the White House provided budget increases to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. CIA officials have been quoted in news reports as saying they did not do well in budgetary struggles even during the second term. Since the relevant budgets are all highly classified, it is difficult to resolve the contradictions with any confidence. Clearly the second Clinton term was better for counterterrorism budgets than the first. A separate issue is whether other cuts at the CIA during this period in the Directorate of Operations, on which the center heavily depended, merely shifted the burden of the budget problems from one CIA office to another. This, too, is a difficult question to resolve without fuller access to the classified budgets.

24. That the center had no more than one hundred personnel during this time and its branch structure are from the interview with Bedington, November 19, 2001.

25. Interview with Larry Johnson, deputy director of the State Department's counterterrorism office during this period, January 15, 2002, Bethesda, Maryland (SC). Clinton signed two important policy documents on terrorism, Presidential Decision Directive-35 and Presidential Decision Directive-39, during the first six months of 1995. See chapter 16.

26. This history draws from the staff report of Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry into the events of September 11, issued October 8, 2002.

27. Benjamin and Simon are especially forceful in their criticisms of the FBI's internal culture. They quote Clinton's former national security adviser, Samuel Berger, and deputy national security adviser James Steinberg complaining that they could not extract crucial information from the FBI about a wide variety of subjects including terrorism. Benjamin and Simon write, "For the NSC staff working on counterterrorism, this was crippling-but how crippling was also something they could not know. Every day a hundred or more reports from the CIA, DIA, the National Security Agency, and the State Department would be waiting in their computer queues when they got to work. There was never anything from the FBI. The Bureau, despite its wealth of information, contributed nothing to the White House's understanding of al-Qaeda. Virtually none of the information uncovered in any of the Bureau's investigative work flowed to the NSC." Age of Sacred Terror, p. 304.

28. Eleanor Hill, Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry staff report, October 8, 2002.

29. The record of a Woolsey and Lake discussion about bin Laden is from two former senior Clinton administration officials. One of the officials recalled that the memo of the conversation had been prepared by either George Tenet or Richard Clarke, who both later figured heavily in the Clinton administration's covert campaign against bin Laden. This official also believed that the discussion concerned evidence that bin Laden was funding violence by Somali militiamen against American troops. The quotations from and descriptions of CIA reports and cables about bin Laden are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, pp. 5-6.

30. "Did we screw up . . . Of course" interview with Lake, May 5, 2003.

CHAPTER 14: "MAINTAIN A PRUDENT DISTANCE"

1. After working first as chief of analysis and then as deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center from 1993 until 1999, Pillar spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where he completed a book, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, that was published shortly before the September 11 attacks. The book is a thorough and scholarly review of the modern terrorist threat and American policy instruments for containing it, and it provides a rich archive of Pillar's own analytical outlook. The account of Pillar's views in this chapter is based partially on his book and other published journal articles, as well as on multiple interviews with U.S. officials familiar with CIA Counterterrorist Center analysis during this period. Among those who spoke on the record about the 1993-94 period were former CIA director James Woolsey; Stanley Bedington, a senior analyst at the center until 1994; and Thomas Twetten, chief of the CIA's Directorate of Operations during this period.

2. Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt, provides a richly reported account of the rise of the Islamic Group and its roots in the Upper Nile. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have accumulated thorough records of the atrocities in the Algerian conflict after the elections were canceled.

3. This summary of the muddled debates in Washington over the challenge of Islamist insurgencies in North Africa is drawn from interviews with multiple participants, some located at the White House and others at the State Department and the CIA.

4. One issue in the liaison was the routine use of torture against detainees by Egyptian counterterrorist units. The CIA and the State Department tried to calibrate their funding to encourage Egyptian reforms without breaking off the liaison, according to officials involved. At one stage during the mid-1990s the CIA suspended funding to a certain Cairo unit because of its repeated human rights abuses, two officials involved said in interviews. The details of these counterterrorist aid programs and human rights policy decisions remain highly classified, and the extent of American pressure on Egyptian security units is difficult to describe with any confidence. In any event, according to human rights monitors, Egyptian police continued to make widespread use of torture. That the U.S. sent its first declared CIA station chief to Algiers in 1985 is from the author's interview with Whitley Bruner, February 26, 2002,Washington, D.C. (SC). Bruner was the declared station chief. He left Algiers in 1989 and afterward served in the Tunis and Tel Aviv stations before retiring in 1997.

5. Interview with Bruner, February 26, 2002.

6. Ibid.

7. Interviews with former CIA officials in the Near East Division.

8. Interviews with U.S. officials, including officials who consumed CIA intelligence from Saudi Arabia and others familiar with its collection. In an interview, a former British intelligence official who worked in his government's Saudi Arabia station and later in the Middle East department at headquarters said he was told by CIA colleagues in Riyadh during this period that station policy heavily limited their ability to recruit sources in the kingdom on sensitive subjects, including Islamic radicalism.

9. The information concerning Turki's exchange of letters with Clinton is from interviews with Saudi officials. The White House meeting is from interviews with Saudi and U.S. officials. A similar account of the meeting is in the Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1996.

10. The New York Times, August 23, 1993.

11. For an account of the January-February massacres in Kabul, see Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 30. The estimate of ten thousand civilian deaths from fighting during 1993 is from Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism,p. 226. See also Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, pp. 74-75.

12. That Prince Turki worked with Hamid Gul during this period is from Charles Cogan, former CIA Near East Division chief in the Directorate of Operations, writing in "Partners in Time,"World Policy Journal, p. 78, as well as from interviews with Saudi, Pakistani, and U.S. officials. The portrait of Javed Nasir's Islamist outlook is from interviews with multiple Pakistani officials, including his successor as ISI director-general, Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi (Ret.), May 19, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC).

13. To: SECSTATE Washington, D.C., February 5, 1993, "Implications of Continued Stalemate . ..," author's files.

14. That the White House did no policy review on Afghanistan during the first Clinton term is from multiple interviews with former Clinton White House and State Department officials. Christopher's outlook and Raphel's background are from interviews with former Clinton administration officials. David Halberstam's War in a Time of Peace provides a deep account of foreign policy formation during the first Clinton term and the heavy priorities accorded to Clinton's domestic policy agenda.

15. What Raphel argued is from interviews with former Clinton administration officials. Quotations are from the author's interviews with officials who declined to be further identified.

16. "A place where" is from the interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

17. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

18. "Just really background," ibid.

19. Cogan, "Partners in Time," World Policy Journal, p. 82.

CHAPTER 15: "A NEW GENERATION"

1. Cofer Black's biography and Khartoum station profile in 1993 are from interviews with U.S. officials. Black testified before the Joint Inquiry Committee on September 26, 2002. He referred to his service in Sudan in passing during his testimony. Later he became the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator.

2. That the Operating Directive was limited to intelligence collection and did not authorize covert action to disrupt bin Laden is from the author's interviews with U.S. officials. In prepared testimony for the Joint Inquiry Committee on October 17, 2002, CIA director George Tenet said, "As early as 1993, our units watching [bin Laden] began to propose action to reduce his organization's capabilities." The statement suggests that case officers may have proposed specific covert action plans from Khartoum to their superiors at Langley that were turned down.

3. Interviews with U.S. officials.

4. The Saudi-Egyptian intelligence report is from "Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier," publicly released CIA assessment, 1996.

5. Evidence later showed that bin Laden had by now paid for terrorist and paramilitary operations in Yemen, against a hotel occupied by American soldiers, and in Somalia, against U.S. Army Rangers fighting Somali Islamic militias. The CIA and FBI did not learn of bin Laden's involvement in these plots until several years later. A key breakthrough came in the summer of 1996 when a close bin Laden aide, Jamal al-Fadl, who had been embezzling funds, defected from al Qaeda and walked into the U.S. embassy in Eritrea to provide testimony in exchange for asylum.

6. The general portrait of bin Laden's business activities and his $50 million bank investment are from "Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier," the CIA assessment released in 1996. Specific land purchases and office details are from testimony of Jamal al-Fadl in the federal trial of al Qaeda members who attacked the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 6, 2001.

7. Fadl testimony, February 6, 2001.

8. "Talk about jihad," ibid. Bin Laden's movements and wariness are from Fadl testimony and author's interviews with U.S. officials.

9. The Khartoum assassination attempt has been described in many published accounts, although sometimes the details vary slightly. The version here is from interviews with U.S. officials with access to CIA reporting.

10. Jamal al-Fadl was the embezzler. How bin Laden treated him is from his 2001 court testimony, February 6, 2001.

11. "Insatiable carnal desires" is from Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, p. 58. By the CIA's count in "Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier," 1996, his Advisory and Reformation Committee issued "over 350 pamphlets critical of the Saudi government." Greater Hijaz and Greater Yemen are from Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 77-78.

12. Interviews with U.S. and British officials.

13. Prince Turki discussed the effort in an interview with ABC's Nightline on December 10, 2001: "His mother went to see him. His uncle-his uncle was eighty years old. He went to see him in Sudan to try to convince him to come back." Bin Laden's quotations are from Peter L. Bergen, The Holy War, p. 89. His $1 million allowance is from National Commission staff statement no. 15, p. 3-4.

14. Bakr quotation is from Bergen, ibid. How senior Saudi princes thought of bin Laden in this period is from interviews with Saudi officials.

15. In his congressional testimony on September 26, 2002, Black referred to bin Laden's attempt to kill him but provided no details. This account is from interviews with U.S. officials.

16. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 242-43.

17. Five contemporaneous witness interview reports, produced as evidence in Yousef 's trial, document in detail the conversations between Yousef and U.S. federal agents immediately after his arrest. See note 15 in chapter 13. In addition, Parr testified twice at federal trials about his rendition of Yousef and their conversations aboard the jet that brought Yousef from Islamabad to New York. Parr testified on August 12, 1996, in the Manila airline bombings case and on October 22, 1997, in Yousef 's World Trade Center bombing case. The description of Yousef 's shackling and examination aboard the plane is from Parr's testimony. Quotations are used only where the reports themselves indicate exact quotations.

18. Interview with Fred Hitz, CIA inspector general during this period, March 8, 2002, Princeton, New Jersey (SC). Stephen Dycus et al., National Security Law, provides a detailed account of the legal issues.

19. Witness interview report by FBI Special Agent Bradley J. Garrett, dictated February 7, 1995, transcribed February 10, 1995.

20. Witness interview report by FBI special agent Bradley J. Garrett, "Pakistan to U.S. Airspace," dictated and transcribed February 8, 1995.

21. Discussions of motive and quotations, ibid.

22. Witness interview report by FBI Special Agent Charles B. Stern and Brian G. Parr, United States Secret Service, "Aircraft in Flight," dictated February 9, 1995, transcribed February 28, 1995.

23. Yousef 's comments about his flight to Pakistan, who aided him in Manila, and bin Laden, ibid.

24. The information about the guest house owned by bin Laden is from multiple published sources, including Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 237. Yousef had also spent many hours at the International Islamic University in Islamabad where Abdullah Azzam first lectured when he came to Pakistan, according to Mary Anne Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt, p. 196.

25. Stern and Parr witness interview report, "Aircraft in Flight," February 9, 1995.

26. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has recently been described by U.S. officials as a suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks. He was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, by Pakistani police and intelligence officers. Most accounts sketch his life in tracks that run parallel to Ramzi Yousef 's: of Pakistani origin but raised in Kuwait and educated in engineering in the West. Mohammed briefly attended a Baptist college in North Carolina before transferring to North Carolina A&T, a historically black university, where he studied mechanical engineering. He reportedly told American interrogators that he joined the Muslim Brotherhood at age 16.

27. The New York Times, June 9, 2002.

28. Morocco attack, The New York Times, January 14, 2001. Air France hijacking and Eiffel Tower kamikaze plan from Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002. Belgian manual, The New York Times, January 14, 2001. Mindanao attack,Asiaweek, May 5, 1995. For a thorough account of the Mubarak assassination attempt, see Weaver, A Portrait of Egypt, pp. 174-77. Threat to Lake, Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 244. Among the multiple published accounts of the Riyadh bombing, Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou, pp. 73-74, has substantial detail. Among the multiple accounts of the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, provides the perspective of one of the conspirators.

29. Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

30. Woolsey's December visit and CIA reporting on Shiite threats during 1995 are from "Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Staff Report on the Khobar Towers Terrorist Attack," September 12, 1996. That Hezbollah was the reported source of the threat against Lake is from an interview with a Clinton administration official. "Out of nowhere" is from the author's interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC). Saudi Shiites with links to Iranian intelligence services detonated a truck bomb near a U.S. Air Force apartment compound called Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia on June 25, 1996, killing nineteen American airmen and wounding hundreds of others. The CIA's Riyadh station, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Saudi intelligence detected the Shiite terrorist threat in the kingdom many months before the Khobar bombing occurred. The September 12 staff report describes intelligence reporting and protection planning in Saudi Arabia during 1995 in some detail. After the Khobar bombing, Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry was slow to cooperate with FBI investigators, creating new tensions in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

31. Federal Register, Executive Order 12947, January 25, 1995. The failure to list al Qaeda in 1995 is difficult to understand, given the steady stream of reporting then in hand at the CIA about bin Laden's contacts in Khartoum with anti-Israeli groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Algeria's Armed Islamic Group, Egypt's Islamic Group, and some even more radical Egyptian factions. At that point, however, al Qaeda had not formally declared war on the United States or Israel, and it had not been directly implicated in any terrorist attacks. Later, in 1997, the State Department released its first list of officially designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and it did not include al Qaeda on that list, either. By then the evidence about al Qaeda's global terrorism was far more substantial and far more widely available on the public record. The State Department's counterterrorism coordinator at the time, Philip C. Wilcox, said in February 1995 that while "there are informal contacts among Islamists . . . there is little hard evidence of a coordinated international network or command and control apparatus among these groups." Benjamin and Simon, in Age of Sacred Terror, quote Robert Blitzer, who was in charge of the FBI's international terrorism division until 1996, as saying that until his departure, "the community kept saying ad hoc terrorists and loosely affiliated terrorists and I didn't agree. . . . I thought this was some kind of major network. We just didn't have enough of an intelligence base, didn't know how bin Laden and others were commanding it, how they moved people and how they moved money. We didn't have that information sorted out."

32. Interviews with Saudi officials and U.S. officials. Among the former Riyadh CIA station chiefs who were consultants for Prince Turki was Ray Close, who had run the station during the 1970s. Another station chief from a later period retired to Spain on a Saudi consultancy, according to his former colleagues. A number of Middle East specialists from Britain's MI6 intelligence service also acquired retainer contracts. Frank Anderson, the CIA's Near East Division chief, who had argued that the jihadists from Afghanistan were not a major factor in North African Islamist insurgencies, left the agency in 1995. He soon joined a Washington consultancy that maintained close ties with the Saudi government.

33. The author is grateful to Walter Pincus who first reported on this document in The Washington Post on June 6, 2002, and who provided a copy of the passages analyzing Sunni Islamic terrorism.

34. Ibid. All quotations are from the document.

35. The estimate remains classified, but CIA director George Tenet quoted from it at length in his October 17, 2002, prepared testimony to the Joint Inquiry Committee investigating the September 11 attacks. Eleanor Hill also quoted portions of the estimate in her September 18, 2002, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement. The quotations here are from Tenet's testimony, except for "new breed," which is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 4, and "As far as . . . his associates," from the final report, p. 313.

36. Ibid. "New terrorist phenomenon" from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 1-2. Estimate title from staff statement no. 11, p. 4.

CHAPTER 16: "SLOWLY, SLOWLY SUCKED INTO IT"

1. The account of Durrani's ascension is drawn primarily from Olaf Caroe, The Pathans, pp. 254-55, and Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, pp. 22-23. A former British officer in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Caroe draws on multiple original and imperial sources.

2. Caroe, The Pathans. He attributes the story of Durrani's selection at the jirga to the 1905 autobiography of the "Iron Amir" of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman, who recorded the story as it was recounted "in the Kabul annals." Whatever its basis in fact, the story's themes-Durrani's humble silence and the attempt by more powerful khans to choose a weak king-became an oft-repeated, shaping narrative of Afghan politics.

3. Ibid., pp. 251-85. The first dynasty of Durrani royals passed from Ahmed Shah through his son Timur, located in the Saddozai Popalzai tribal branch. The second and third dynasties, terminating with King Zahir Shah in 1973, drew its leaders from the Mohammedzai Barakzai tribal branch.

4. The Naqibullah quotation is from Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, January 28, 2002. Anderson had traveled in southern Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad and had spent weeks in a mujahedin encampment overseen by Naqibullah. After the Taliban lost Kandahar in December 2001, Anderson met up with Naqibullah again and spent several days in his company. He saw that the warlord was carrying a prescription written in Germany for antipsychotic medication and asked him about it, prompting Naqibullah's explanation.

5. Interview with Spozhmai Maiwandi, a Pashtun broadcaster with Voice of America who chronicled the Taliban's rise and spoke regularly with Mullah Omar and other Tal- iban leaders, March 28, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW). Maiwandi's frequent interviews with the Taliban on VOA's Pashto-language service led some other Afghans, especially those loyal to Ahmed Shah Massoud, to denounce the U.S.-funded radio service as pro- Taliban. VOA's reputation in turn fueled suspicions in the region that the Taliban was an instrument of U.S. policy.

6. The account of the rural roots of the Taliban is mainly from Olivier Roy, "Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?," in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, pp. 204-11, as well as from interviews with Maiwandi and other Kandahar Pashtuns. Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia is the definitive book-length account of the movement. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, and Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, also provide detailed accounts of the movement's origins and rise.

7. Rashid, Taliban, pp. 90-91, reports that the madrassa long funded about four hundred places for Afghan students. In 1999 it had fifteen thousand applicants. Rashid quotes the Haqqannia's leader, Pakistani politician Samiul Haq, complaining that Pakistani intelligence ignored his madrassa during the anti- Soviet jihad, favoring a network of Muslim Brotherhood- linked religious schools affiliated with Jamaat-e-Islami and Hekmatyar. Jamaa-e-Islami was the Islamist political rival to Haq's political party.

8. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics, p. 204. For deeper accounts of the roots of the School of Islamic Studies at Deoband and its role in Muslim theology and anticolonial movements, Ewans recommends A. A. Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, two volumes, 1978 and 1983, and Rizvi's History of Dar al-Ulum Deoband, 1980.

9. Rashid, Taliban, pp. 87-94.

10. Interview with Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai, May 12, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

11. Interview with Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW), and with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (SC).

12. This account of Karzai's detention by Fahim, his interrogation, and the circumstances of his escape is drawn from interviews with multiple sources involved in the episode, including Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002, and Afghan vice president Hedayat Amin-Arsala, May 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Amin-Arsala was foreign minister at the time of Karzai's detention. Amin-Arsala was never certain who ordered Karzai's arrest: "I'm not really quite sure if [then Afghan president Rabbani] ordered his arrest. But certainly the intelligence people, who were headed by Fahim, they knew."

13. Interview with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002.

14. That Karzai provided $50,000 in cash and a large cache of weapons is from Karzai's interview with Ahmed Rashid, The Daily Telegraph, December 8, 2001. Why Karzai supported the Taliban and that many Pashtuns hoped they would lead to the king's return are from interviews with Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002; Hedayat Amin-Arsala, May 21, 2002; Hashmat Ghani Ahmadzai, May 12, 2002; and Zalmai Rassoul, May 18, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

15. Even Omar's birth year is uncertain. Rashid, Taliban, p. 23, places Omar's birth "sometime around 1959." An undated CIA biographical fact sheet about Omar describes his birth as "circa 1950." Each of these dates has been used in various press accounts to estimate Omar's age, compounding the confusion. The account given to U.S. diplomats is from the declassified State Department cable "Finally, a Talkative Talib," from Islamabad to Washington, February 20, 1995, released by the National Security Archive.

16. CIA fact sheet, ibid. Omar's ties to Bashar and "charismatic nor articulate" are from "Finally, a Talkative Talib," ibid.

17. Taliban legend, Associated Press, September 20, 2001. Red Cross, Sunday Times, September 23, 2001.

18. The Washington Post, December 27, 2001.

19. Toronto Star, December 9, 2001.

20. "A simple band . . . goal" is from Time, October 1, 2001. "The Taliban . . . our people" is from the Associated Press, September 20, 2001.

21. Roy, "Has Islamism a Future in Afghanistan?," p. 211. "Of course, the problem with the Taliban is that they mean what they say," Roy wrote three years after their initial emergence. "They do not want a King, because there is no King in Islam. . . . The Taliban are not a factor for stabilization in Afghanistan."

22. Interview with Benazir Bhutto, May 5, 2002, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (GW). This section is also drawn in part from interviews with Pakistani officials close to Bhutto.

23. The Bhutto quotations are from the Benazir Bhutto interview, May 5, 2002.

24. Ibid.

25. All quotations, ibid.

26. Interview with Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi (Ret.), May 19, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC). Qazi was the director-general of Pakistani intelligence at the time. "This was seventeen tunnels!" he said. "Seventeen tunnels full of arms and ammunition. Enough to raise almost half the size of Pakistan's army." The dump had been created just before the end of the anticommunist phase of the Afghan war. "Both sides, they pumped in an immense amount of weapons. . . . And dumps were created." Other detailed accounts of the seizure of the Spin Boldak dump include Anthony Davis, "How the Taliban Became a Military Force," in Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, pp. 45-46, Rashid, Taliban, pp. 27-28, and Rashid, "Pakistan and the Taliban," in Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 81. Rashid, citing interviews with Pakistani military officials and diplomats, estimates the dump held about eighteen thousand AK-47 assault rifles and 120 artillery pieces.

27. The extent of Babar's involvement with the Taliban at the time of their emergence remains unclear. A boastful man, Babar fueled suspicion that he had created and armed the movement by introducing Taliban leaders to the likes of Prince Turki, the Saudi intelligence chief, and calling them "my children." But several associates of Babar said these quotes have been blown out of proportion and they mainly reflect Babar's habits of blustery speech.

28. Mullah Naqibullah, one of Kandahar's dominant warlords at the time, said that as the Taliban swept into the city, he and other local Pashtun powers were urged by Hamid Karzai, other Pashtun leaders, and President Rabbani in Kabul not to fight against the Taliban. For Rabbani and Massoud the Taliban initially looked like a Pashtun force that could hurt their main enemy, Hekmatyar.

29. Davis, "How the Taliban Became a Military Force," pp. 48-49.

30. Interview with Qazi, May 19, 2002.

31. Interview with Bhutto, May 5, 2002. The CIA reported on the links between ISI's Afghan training camps and the Kashmir insurgency during this period, at one point threatening to place Pakistan on the U.S. list of nations deemed to be terrorist sponsors.

32. All quotations from "chap in Kandahar" through "all of them" are from the interview with Qazi, May 19, 2002.

33. All quotations from "I became slowly" through "carte blanche" are from the interview with Bhutto, May 5, 2002.

34. Rashid, "Pakistan and the Taliban," p. 86, describes the internal ISI debate about the Taliban during 1995. "The debate centered around those largely Pashtun officers involved in covert operations on the ground who wanted greater support for the Taliban, and other officers who were involved in longer term intelligence gathering and strategic planning who wished to keep Pakistan's support to a minimum so as not to worsen tensions with Central Asia and Iran. The Pashtun grid in the army high command eventually played a major role in determining the military and ISI's decision to give greater support to the Taliban."

35. Interview with Bhutto, May 5, 2002.

36. Interview with Ahmed Badeeb, February 1, 2002, Jedda, Saudi Arabia (SC).

37. Scene and quotations, ibid.

38. Ibid. See note 27.

39. Turki's interview with MBC, November 6, 2001.

40. After Hekmatyar was forced into exile by the Taliban, he visited Prince Turki in Saudi Arabia, hoping for assistance, according to Saudi officials. When a stunned Turki asked Hekmatyar why the kingdom should help him when he had denounced the royal family in its time of need in 1991, Hekmatyar shrugged obsequiously. His speeches then had been "only politics," he said, according to the Saudi account.

41. That Saudi intelligence paid cash bonuses to ISI officers is from an interview with a Saudi analyst. That Saudi Arabia subsidized Pakistan with discounted oil is from multiple interviews with Saudi officials. That Saudi intelligence preferred to deal directly with Pakistani intelligence is from the interview with Badeeb, February 1, 2002.

42. "Situation reports" and development of the liaison are from an interview with a senior Saudi official.

43. Prince Turki has said publicly that the Taliban "did not receive a single penny in cash from the kingdom from its founding," only humanitarian aid. None of the kingdom's records are transparent or published, so it is impossible to be sure, but Turki's claim, even if interpreted narrowly, seems unlikely to withstand scrutiny. Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi intelligence analyst, wrote in a 1998 master's thesis, "Improving U.S. Intelligence Analysis on the Saudi Arabian Decision Making Process," that most of the Saudi aid to the Taliban was funneled by the kingdom's official religious establishment. Obaid quotes a "high-ranking official in the Ministry of Islamic Guidance" as saying that after the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, the kingdom's religious leaders "focused on funding and encouraging the Taliban." Human Rights Watch quoted journalists who saw white-painted C-130 Hercules transport aircraft which they identified as Saudi Arabian at Kandahar airport in 1996 delivering artillery and small arms ammunition to Taliban soldiers. There were subsequent reports of strong arms supply links between the Taliban and commercial dealers operating from the United Arab Emirates as well. Taliban religious police, Human Rights Watch concluded, were "funded directly by Saudi Arabia; this relatively generous funding . . . enabled it to become the most powerful agency within the Islamic Emirate."

44. Interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC). Turki also said, "We had taken a policy, since the civil war started in Afghanistan, that we're not going to support any group in Afghanistan, financially or otherwise, from the government but that humanitarian aid [from Saudi Arabia] could continue. And it was mostly through these [charity] organizations that the humanitarian aid went to Afghanistan. . . . Now, I can't tell you that individuals did not go and give money to the Taliban. I'm sure that happened. But not the institutions themselves."

45. See note 43.

46. Interviews with senior Saudi officials.

47. Interviews with U.S. officials. All of the quotations are from State Department cables between November 3, 1994, and February 20, 1995, declassified and released by the National Security Archive.

48. Interview with Bhutto, May 5, 2002. Quotations from Talbott meeting are from a State Department cable of February 21, 1996, declassified and released by the National Security Archive. Bhutto's comments to Wilson and Brown are from a State Department cable, April 14, 1996.

49. Interview with former senator Hank Brown, February 5, 2003, by telephone (GW). Brown was one of the very few elected politicians in Washington to pay attention to Afghanistan during this period. "I just get a lump in my throat every time I think about it, but Afghanistan really is the straw that broke the camel's back in the Cold War," he recalled. "If there ever was a people in this world that we're indebted to, it would be the people of Afghanistan. And for us to turn our backs on them, it was just criminal. Who's done more to help us? It really is a disgrace what we did."

CHAPTER 17: "DANGLING THE CARROT"

1. Miller's background, outlook, and involvement with the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan Pakistan pipeline deal are from the author's interview with Miller, September 23, 2002, Austin, Texas (SC and GW).

2. In Unocal's 1994 10-K, the company explained its losses by saying that "the 1994 operating earnings reflected higher natural gas production, higher foreign crude oil production, stronger earnings from agricultural products, and lower domestic oil and gas operating and depreciation expense. However, these positive factors could not make up for the lower crude oil and natural gas prices, and lower margins in the company's West Coast refining and marketing operations." Two years later, in 1996, the company sold its refining and marketing operations to focus more exclusively on international exploration and development.

3. The company's 1996 annual report was titled "A New World, A New Unocal," and it detailed a major turnaround in the company's business strategy.

4. For a detailed discussion of the stranded energy reserves of the Caspian region and the dilemma faced by Turkmenistan in particular, see Ahmed Rashid's Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, pp. 143-56.

5. Ibid., p. 168.

6. Interview with Miller, September 23, 2002.

7. That the control tower was built on the wrong side is from Steve LeVine, The Washington Post, November 11, 1994. LeVine quotes a Western diplomat as saying, "The builders warned them, but the Turkmen said, 'It looks better this way.' " Other colorful depictions of Niyazov's post-Soviet rule include Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times, November 23, 1995; Daniel Sneider, The Christian Science Monitor, March 25, 1996; and Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post, July 8, 2002.

8. The numbers on trade between the United States and the Central Asian republics are from the testimony of James F. Collins, the State Department's senior coordinator for the new independent states, before the House International Relations Committee, November 14, 1995.

9. "Promote the independence . . ." is from the testimony of Sheila Heslin, former National Security Council staffer, before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, September 17, 1997. The assistance of the U.S. ambassador and others in the government to Unocal is from the interview with Miller, September 23, 2002, and American government officials. For an examination of U.S. energy strategy in the region, see Dan Morgan and David Ottaway, The Washington Post, September 22, 1997.

10. Interview with a senior Saudi official.

11. Author's interview with Benazir Bhutto, May 5, 2002, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (GW). Bhutto would only say that Bulgheroni's Bridas visited her "through one of the Muslim Arab leaders." In a separate interview, however, Turki said that he was the one who made Bulgheroni's introductions with the Pakistani leadership.

12. Platt's Oilgram News, October 23, 1995.

13. Dan Morgan and David Ottaway, The Washington Post, October 5, 1998. Kissinger quoted Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was commenting on a man who had wed for a second time immediately after the end of a miserable first marriage.

14. Robert Baer, See No Evil, pp. xix and 244.

15. Raphel's views on the pipeline and her activities in support of it are from interviews with a senior Clinton administration official. "We were all aware that business advocacy was part of our portfolio," the official said. "We were doing it for that reason, and we could choose Unocal because they were the only American company."

16. Simons's background, his tenure as ambassador, and his perspective on the pipeline are from the author's interview with Tom Simons, August 19, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

17. Ibid. More than half a decade after the fact, Bhutto spoke with indignation about those who invoked her husband's name to get her to change sides: "They started saying my husband is interested [in Bridas] and that's why I'm not going to [cancel the MOU with Bridas], which made me really, really upset because I felt that because I am a woman, they're trying to get back at me through my husband. But nonetheless, the fact of the matter was that it had nothing to do with my husband. It had to do with an Arab leader. It had to do with the country he represented. And the fact that [Bridas] had come first. I mean, they're wanting us to break a legal contract . . ."

18. Interview with a Pakistani government official.

19. Interviews with Bhutto, May 5, 2002, and Simons, August 19, 2002. Despite the contentious nature of the meeting, Bhutto and Simons provided similar accounts, with neither one attempting to mask just how poorly it had gone. Simons described it as "a disastrous meeting," and Bhutto called it "a low point in our relations with America."

20. The account of the Unocal-Delta expedition into Afghanistan is based on the author's interview with Miller, September 23, 2002, interviews with Delta's American representative, Charlie Santos, in New York on August 19 and 23, 2002, and again on February 22, 2003 (GW).

21. A copy of the Unocal support agreement was provided to the author. The agreement contained the caveat that "a condition for implementation of the pipeline projects is the establishment of a single, internationally recognized entity authorized to act on behalf of all Afghan parties." The word entity was deliberately used instead of government to give Unocal some wiggle room down the line.

22. In June, Santos returned to Kandahar without Miller and stayed for more than a week, to try one more time to get the Taliban to sign the support agreement. Finally, Santos got fed up and tore into one of the Taliban negotiators: "We've been sitting here for ten days, and you keep saying, 'Wait another day. Wait another day. Wait another day.' I'm going! This is bullshit! Forget this project!" With that he went out to his car and started to drive away. As he did, he saw one of the Taliban in his rearview mirror yelling for him not to go. After several more hours of negotiations, the Taliban at last agreed to sign a handwritten two-sentence statement saying that they supported the concept of the pipeline, but nothing more.

CHAPTER 18: "WE COULDN'T INDICT HIM"

1. Interview with Marty Miller, September 23, 2002, Austin, Texas (SC and GW).

2. Interview with Tom Simons, August 19, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

3. Interviews with several U.S. officials familiar with the CIA-ISI liaison during this period. Rana's professional background is from Pakistani journalist Kamran Khan. Rana's outlook is from interviews with U.S. officials and also an interview with his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi (Ret.), May 19, 2002, Rawalpindi, Pakistan (SC). He recalled that ISI had come under "tremendous fire" in Pakistan because of the raid in Quetta in search of Kasi that had been based on faulty information.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials.

5. "All the way down to the bare bones" is from The New York Times, April 27, 1995. The portrait of Deutch here is drawn from multiple published sources and interviews with former colleagues of Deutch at the White House and the CIA. Moynihan's legislation was introduced in January 1995: Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1995.

6. "A technical guy" is from The New York Times Magazine, December 10, 1995. "From what I know" is from his confirmation hearing, The New York Times, April 27, 1995.

7. Twelve case officers in training and eight hundred worldwide is from Bob Woodward, The Washington Post, November 17, 2001, confirmed by interviews with U.S. officials. That this represented about a 25 percent decline from the Cold War's peak is from interviews with U.S. officials. See also testimony of George Tenet before the Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. "California hot tub stuff " is from an interview with a Directorate of Operations officer who retired during this period.

8. Interview with Fritz Ermath, January 7, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

9. Portrait of White House terrorism analysis, Clinton's interest in biological terrorism, and policy review in the first half of 1995 are from interviews with former Clinton administration officials.

10. "U.S. Policy on Counterterrorism," June 21, 1995, redacted version declassified and publicly released. Context for the decision directive's issuance can be found in Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 229-30. Benjamin and Simon arrived in the White House counterterrorism office soon after the new policy took effect.

11. The UBL acronym as the ultimate sign of importance is from an interview with Anthony Lake, May 5, 2003, Washington, D.C. (GW). That the bin Laden unit was formally known as the bin Laden Issue Station is from the testimony of George Tenet, Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. That the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden unit began with about twelve people is from the National Commission's final report. That it was a "virtual station" and a management prototype is from interviews with U.S. officials. That the NSA had tapped bin Laden's satellite telephone during this period is from James Bamford, The Washington Post, June 2, 2002. The bin Laden issue station's startup was accompanied by classified White House directives that delineated the scope of its mission. Whether this initial document authorized active disruption operations against bin Laden's network is not clear. At least some authorities beyond normal intelligence collection may have been provided to the CIA by President Clinton at this stage, but the precise scope is not known.

12. "One of the most significant" is from "Usama bin Ladin: Islamic Extremist Financier," CIA assessment released publicly in 1996. Clarke quotations from his written testimony to the National Commission, March 24, 2004. See also National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 4. "Let's yank on this bin Laden chain" is from the author's interview with a former Clinton administration official.

13. The account in this chapter of internal U.S. deliberations surrounding bin Laden's expulsion from Sudan is based on interviews with eight senior American officials directly involved as well as Saudi and Sudanese officials. Among those who agreed to be interviewed on the record was former U.S. ambassador to Sudan Timothy Carney, July 31, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Carney provided the chronology of the Emergency Action Committee's decision-making and cables to Washington. Benjamin and Simon, strongly defending White House decision-making during this episode, provide a detailed account in Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 244-45. "He says that . . . to kill him either" is from an interview with a former Clinton administration official. The plot against Lake probably originated with Hezbollah, not bin Laden, according to former officials. At one stage the plot became so serious that Lake moved out of his suburban home and authorized a countersurveillance effort aimed at detecting his assassins. This security effort required Lake to authorize secret wiretaps of all his telephones. In 1970, Lake was subject to a secret FBI wiretap by the Nixon administration after he resigned his job as Henry Kissinger's special assistant and then went to work for Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. In 1995, Lake sat at Kissinger's old desk in the Old Executive Office Building as he signed the papers authorizing wiretaps of his own phones. He looked up at the FBI agents, according to one account, and said, "You know, there's a certain irony to all this." The FBI agent reportedly replied in a deadpan tone, "Oh, we know, sir."

14. Interview with Carney, July 31, 2002.

15. Ibid.

16. Interviews with former Clinton administration officials directly involved in the discussions.

17. "An embassy is a tool" is from the interview with Carney, July 31, 2002.

18. That the dinner was on February 6, 1996, is from Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, October 3, 2001. Carney, writing with Mansoor Ijaz, has also published a brief account of his participation, in The Washington Post, June 30, 2002.

19. Gellman, The Washington Post, October 3, 2001, and Carney, The Washington Post, June 30, 2002; also Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 246-47. The original document was published by The Washington Post in October 2001. Clinton administration officials confirmed its authenticity in interviews and described the document's origins in a series of working group meetings led by the National Security Council.

20. Time, May 6, 1996.

21. "We told the Americans" is from an interview with a Sudanese official. No "reliable evidence" is from the National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 3.

22. Interviews with U.S. officials involved. See also, National Commission staff statement no. 5, p. 4.

23. Ibid.

24. The contact with Egypt and Jordan is from an interview with a U.S. official. "To keep him moving" is from the interview with Lake, May 5, 2003. "[W]ere afraid it was . . . done anything to us" is from a speech by Clinton in October 2001 to the Washington Society of Association Executives, quoted in USA Today, November 12, 2001.

25. Interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC).

26. "Never mentioned . . . send him away" is from "Hunting bin Laden," Frontline, March 21, 2000. The Sudanese official's account from an interview with the author.

27. BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, excerpts from Al-Sharaq al-Awsat, June 18, 1996. BBC translation.

28. Badeeb Orbit interview, early 2002. Original Arabic language tape supplied to the author by Badeeb. See notes to chapter 4.

29. Interviews with former Clinton administration officials. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 463-64. In June 1996, Carney visited Deutch and Tenet at CIA headquarters to discuss reopening the Khartoum embassy. By this time Carney was based in Nairobi and traveling occasionally to the Sudanese capital. Carney recalls that Deutch and Tenet were now ready to support reopening the embassy. Tenet said, by Carney's account, that "it was time to get the U.S. government back in, and we need to do it now." Carney said that in an election year, "I can't imagine the administration would want to take a chance that Sudan would somehow become a campaign issue" by taking the risk to reopen the embassy. Carney said, "Let's hold off until after the election and then do it." But Tenet, by Carney's account, replied, "No, we need to do it now." The embassy, however, remained closed.

30. Interview with a Sudanese official.

31. "Sudan is not a good . . ." is from "Hunting bin Laden," Frontline, March 21, 2000. The information from the Sudanese official is from the author's interview. This account tracks with multiple published accounts, including some drawing on Afghan sources in Jalalabad where the flights landed.

32. Badeeb Orbit interview, early 2002. Turki confirmed Badeeb's account of the Qatar stopover in an interview with the author, August 2, 2002. Turki blamed Qatar's decision on the tiny emirate's history of nipping at the heels of its larger Saudi neighbor. For the conclusion of American investigators, see National Commission staff statement no. 5, p. 4, and the final report, p.63.

33. Interviews with U.S. officials involved.

34. Robert Fisk, The Independent, July 10, 1996.

35. This account of the failed attempt to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Qatar is drawn mainly from the interviews with U.S. officials. See also the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, pp. 310-13 and the National Commission's staff statement no. 5, pp. 2-3. For how Mohammed was assigned within CTC, see the commission's final report, p. 276. James Risen and David Johnston published an excellent account of the episode in The New York Times, March 8, 2003. The quotations from Freeh's letter are from their account.

36. Kathy Gannon, Associated Press, July 11, 1996. Sudan's government formally reported to the United Nations on June 3, 1996, that bin Laden had left that country for Afghanistan. Initial press reports from Pakistan quoted Pakistani intelligence and religious party leaders as saying that bin Laden's arrival in Afghanistan had been facilitated in part by his former allies from the anti-Soviet jihad, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami.

37. Interview with Kenneth Katzman, Congressional Research Service terrorism analyst, August 27, 2002,Washington,D.C. (GW).

38. United Press International, June 7, 1996.

39. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, pp. 41-42; Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, p. xv; Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 65.

40. Quotations from Raphel's meetings and Simons's cables from "A/S Raphel Discusses Afghanistan," declassified cable, April 22, 1996, released by the National Security Archive. Massoud's perspective is from interviews with aides to Massoud.

41. "Has become a conduit for drugs" is from Robin Raphel's testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, June 6, 1996. "Concerned that economic opportunities" and "will be very good" are from Rashid, Taliban, pp. 45 and 166. Raphel's comment to a Russian counterpart from State Department cable of May 13, 1996, declassified and released by the National Security Archive.

42. Life expectancy is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 135. That Afghanistan was 173 is from Raphel, Senate Subcommittee testimony, June 6, 1996.

43. Interview with Benazir Bhutto, May 5, 2002, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (GW). That all the while Bhutto continued to lie: In meetings in Islamabad in the spring of 1996 with one of their strongest supporters in the U.S. Congress, Senator Hank Brown, Bhutto and her aides denied providing any aid to the Taliban. On June 26, 1996, Bhutto's ambassador to the United States, Maleeha Lodhi, testified at a congressional hearing: "Pakistan, let me state emphatically, does not provide arms or ammunition to any faction."

44. Interview with Simons, August 19, 2002.

45. Interviews with U.S. officials. Steve Le- Vine of Newsweek first reported publicly on bin Laden's large payments to the Taliban, on October 13, 1997. National Commission investigators describe bin Laden's 1996 financial problems in staff statement no. 15, although they provide no assessment of any payments to the Taliban. Given his $1 million allowance for more than ten years, $3 million would not be an exorbitant sum for bin Laden even in tight times. But it is not clear what contributions he made, if any, or where they came from.

46. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 28. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 134.

47. The Massoud quotes and tactical details are from Davis, "How the Taliban Became a Military Force," in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, pp. 65-67. Ahmed Rashid writes in the same volume, p. 87, on the role of Pakistani intelligence during this period: "The ISI played a leading role in helping the Taliban's capture of Jalalabad and Kabul, first by helping subvert the Jalalabad Shura and offering its members sanctuary in Pakistan, and then allowing the Taliban to reinforce their assault on Kabul by fresh troops drawn from Afghan refugee camps on the border."

48. Ibid.

49. Najibullah's translation and comment are from The Guardian, October 12, 1996, and from an interview with a U.N. official who visited Najibullah.

50. Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 3.

51. Quotations ibid., pp. 6-7.

52. Nancy Hatch Dupree, "Afghan Women Under the Taliban," in Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 156, citing United Nations human rights reporting.

53. All quotations are from "Dealing with the Taliban in Kabul," a State Department cable from Washington to Islamabad and other embassies, September 28, 1996, declassified and released by the National Security Archive.

54. Simons's remarks from "Ambassador Meets the Taliban," State Department cable of November 12, 1996, declassified and released by the National Security Archive. Simons also discussed the meeting in an interview. Christopher's letter and Raphel-Karzai from "U.S. Engagement with the Taliban on Osama bin Laden," State Department memo declassified and released by the National Security Archive.

55. Rashid, Taliban, p. 178, and Richard MacKenzie, "The United States and the Taliban," in Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 91.

CHAPTER 19: "WE'RE KEEPING THESE STINGERS"

1. Schroen's trip to Kabul and his discussions with Massoud are described in detail in the Prologue.

2. Interviews with U.S. officials.

3. Interviews with U.S., Pakistani, Saudi, and Afghan intelligence officials involved with the Stinger program.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials.

5. "The U.S. does not support," Agence France Presse, October 24, 1996. "Impossible to justify" is from Dupree, in William Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 149.

6. "Fanatically neutral" is from The New York Times, October 23, 1996.

7. The Washington Post, October 7, 1996.

8. This account of Schroen's visit to Kandahar is from interviews with U.S. officials.

9. "We're keeping these Stingers" is from an interview with Gary Schroen, May 7, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC).

10. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 93. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 137. Quotations are from Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, August 23, 1998.

11. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 1-23. Loeb, The Washington Post, August 23, 1998.

12. The Prince Turki quotations are from Nightline, December 10, 2001. "Mistaken policy or accident of history-take your pick," the Saudi foreign minister Saud al- Faisal, Turki's brother, said in an interview with The Washington Post during the same period. "The stability of Afghanistan seemed a bigger concern than the presence of bin Laden. . . . When the Taliban received him, they indicated he would be absolutely prevented from taking any actions. We had unequivocal promises." During this same period the Clinton White House was struggling to win cooperation from the Saudis for investigations of Iranian involvement in the terrorist bombing of June 1996 at Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia. But the Saudis, under the initiative of Crown Prince Abdullah, were in the midst of trying to construct a negotiated rapprochement with newly elected Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. The Saudis did not want the Americans to destroy this détente by prosecuting Iranian operatives involved in the bombing or launching retaliatory military strikes against Iran. Sandy Berger met repeatedly with Prince Bandar to try to win Saudi cooperation, but later he described the talks as a Saudi "ritual of evasion."

13. Interviews with Charlie Santos, August 19 and 23, 2002, New York City (GW). Also interview with Marty Miller, September 23, 2002, Austin, Texas (SC and GW), and interviews with U.S., Pakistani, and Afghan officials who traveled through Kandahar during this period.

14. Ibid. Also, interview with Thomas Goutierre, September 18, 2002, Omaha, Nebraska (GW). A center run by Goutierre at the University of Nebraska was retained by Unocal to train Pashtuns in Kandahar as oil pipeline workers in order to show the Taliban the potential economic benefits of the pipeline.

15. Bin Laden's death threat against Brown is from an interview with former senator Hank Brown, February 5, 2003, by telephone (GW). In August 1996, Brown visited Kandahar on a multistop trip to Afghanistan designed to stir interest in peace talks. In Kandahar he met with senior Taliban officials. The Taliban had captured and imprisoned several Russian pilots who were running arms to Massoud's government. Brown, a former Navy pilot in Vietnam, visited with the prisoners. They asked Brown to pass along to the Taliban a request that they be permitted to run the engines on their plane once a month so that it would be in condition to fly if they were ever released. Brown did pass along the request, and a few weeks later the Taliban took their prisoners to the airport to check the engines on their plane. The Russians overpowered their guards, hopped into their plane, and flew away. The Taliban angrily blamed Brown for this fiasco. That the United States did not seriously begin to plan covert action to capture or kill bin Laden until the end of 1997 is from interviews with multiple U.S. officials. From their perspective at the White House, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon acknowledge in The Age of Sacred Terror that there was little sense of urgency about bin Laden among counterterrorism planners there until December 1997. The sense remained that bin Laden was a financier of Islamist extremists, not a major terrorist operator himself.

16. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, pp. 201-2.

17. Ibid., p. 54, quoting Omar's interview with Rahimullah Yousufzai in the Pakistani English-language newspaper The News .

18. Reuters, April 10, 1997.

19. "Massoud felt cheated" is from an interview with Haroun Amin, September 9, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW).

20. "He never thought for a second" is from an interview with Ahmed Wali Massoud, May 7, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

21. Massoud's trusted intelligence aide Engineer Arif was dispatched to sell gems in Las Vegas at one point, according to a U.S. official who met with him on the visit. "Day by day" is from an interview with Mohammed Neem, May 27, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

22. "No way" is from an interview with Daoud Mir, July 31 and August 8, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW). "He could have an understanding" is from the author's interview with Mohiden Mehdi, May 27, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). The earlier quotations from State Department reports about Pakistani aid to the Taliban are from declassified cables released by the National Security Archive.

23. Interview with a senior intelligence aide to Massoud.

24. The account of this trip is drawn from the interviews with U.S. officials and with aides to Massoud.

25. Quotations ibid. In recounting the history of their secret contacts with Massoud during the late 1990s, U.S. officials tend to emphasize the role of counterterrorism in the early meetings more than Massoud's aides do. Abdullah, then Massoud's foreign policy adviser, said in an interview that in 1997 "the discussions on terrorism had not really started." While there were general talks with the CIA about bin Laden, "what I can say is that it started with this narrow thing, Stingers. But it gradually developed." The Americans, on the other hand, saw the Stinger recovery program as a way to supplement Massoud's income and strengthen his military potential, and as a way to develop trust and regular communication for intelligence reporting about bin Laden.

26. Interview with Neem, May 27, 2002, and with other aides to Massoud, including several senior intelligence officers.

27. The Rashid quotation is from "Pakistan and the Taliban," in Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 88. Rashid continues: "Pakistan's strategy towards the Taliban was characterized as much by drift as by determination. Islamabad's policy was as much driven by corruption, infighting and inefficiency as it was a concerted attempt to push forward a Pashtun agenda in Afghanistan."

28. Interview with Mushahid Hussain, May 21, 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan (SC).

29. "They asked that we recognize" and "had no clue of how to run a country" are from Badeeb's interview with Orbit, early 2002, translated by the Language Doctors, Inc., Washington, D.C. "They are very religious people" is from the author's interview with Ahmed Badeeb, February 1, 2002, Jedda, Saudi Arabia (SC). "So as to fill the obvious vacuum" is from Badeeb's interview with Orbit.

30. Interview with Yar Mohabbat, September 20, 2002, St. Louis, Missouri (GW).

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid., and an interview with a congressional aide who toured the embassy during this period.

33. Ibid., and interviews with State Department officials. Rick Inderfurth, then the newly arrived assistant secretary of state for South Asia, recalled satisfaction over the State Department's ability to prevent the Taliban from taking control of the embassy, which might have increased their influence. The only way to prevent the Taliban takeover, Inderfurth argued, was to shut the embassy altogether.

34. The number fifty thousand widows is from a January 1997 survey by the International Committee for the Red Cross, cited in Nancy Hatch Dupree, "Afghan Women Under the Taliban," in Maley, ed., Fundamentalism Reborn, p. 155. U.N. appeal figures are from Rashid, Taliban, p. 108.

35. Tomsen cable: "Afghanistan Settlement-Analysis and Policy Recommendations," June 1997, excised and declassified April 4, 2000, author's files.

CHAPTER 20: "DOES AMERICA NEED THE CIA?"

1. "The ultimate staff guy" is from The New York Times, March 20, 1997.

2. "Remarks of the Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet on Strategic Direction," declassified transcript, May 5, 1998, released by CIA Office of Public Affairs.

3. Family history is from Tenet's account in two speeches, "Acceptance of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor Forum Club Lunch," November 6, 1997, and "Remarks by DCI George J. Tenet at Swearing-In Ceremony by Vice President Gore," July 31, 1997, CIA Office of Public Affairs.

4. "Always talking" is from the New York Daily News, March 21, 1997. "To the future editorial page editor" is from Newsday, March 21, 1997.

5. "Guy's guy" is from an interview with Cliff Shannon, former aide to Heinz, March 8, 2002, by telephone (GW). "He was the only person . . . hard work" is from an interview with Bill Reinsch, former aide to Heinz, March 5, 2002, by telephone (GW).

6. Interview with Gary Sojka, August 8, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW).

7. Rudman quotation is from The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, March 19, 1997. The Newsom quotation is from an interview with Eric Newsom, March 8, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW).

8. Interview with former senator David Boren, September 16, 2002, Norman, Oklahoma (GW).

9. Ibid. Interview with Clair George, December 12, 2001, Chevy Chase, Maryland (SC). Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

10. Interview with John Despres, February 28, 2002, by telephone (GW).

11. Interviews with former senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff members.

12. Interview with Newsom, March 8, 2002.

13. "Streak of eccentric genius" is from "Acceptance of Ellis Island Medal," November 6, 1997. "Nowhere in the world" is from "Remarks by DCI George J. Tenet at Swearing-In Ceremony," July 31, 1997.

14. "Does America Need the CIA?" November 19, 1997, CIA Office of Public Affairs.

15. "Does America Need the CIA?," November 19, 1997. "George J. Tenet on Strategic Direction," May 5, 1998.

16. "Does America Need the CIA?," November 19, 1997.

17. "George J. Tenet on Strategic Direction," May 5, 1998.

18. "Does America Need the CIA?," November 19, 1997. "George J. Tenet on Strategic Direction," May 5, 1998. "Should never be the last resort" is from Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Hearing on the Nomination of George Tenet as Director of Central Intelligence," May 6, 1997.

19. This habit of personality extended even to his religious faith. Tenet and his family worshiped at a Greek Orthodox church. He also routinely attended Catholic mass with his best friend, Jack DeGioia, a philosopher and academic administrator who had risen to become president of Georgetown University, Tenet's alma mater. Without any discomfort he could move "back and forth between the two," as DeGioia put it. Interview with Jack DeGioia, March 26, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW).

20. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Hearing on the Nomination of George Tenet," May 6, 1997, and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Hearing on "World Threat Assessment," January 28, 1998. That Clinton's guidance to the intelligence community about collection priorities was a classified presidential decision directive is from author's interviews with former Clinton administration officials. Clinton's quotes about those priorities are from "Remarks by the President to Staff of the CIA and the Intelligence Community," July 14, 1995, White House, Office of the Press Secretary.

21. "Remarks by DCI George J. Tenet to the University of Oklahoma," September 12, 1997, CIA Office of Public Affairs.

22. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "Hearing on the Nomination of George Tenet," May 6, 1997.

23. "George J. Tenet on Strategic Direction," May 5, 1998.

24. The Albright quotation is from Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 342. "We're opposed to their [the Taliban's] approach on human rights," Albright said. "We're opposed to their despicable treatment of women and children and their lack of respect for human dignity. . . . It is impossible to modernize a nation if half or more of a population is left behind." Hillary Clinton's quotations are from "Remarks by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, United Nations Economic and Social Council," December 10, 1997, White House Press Office.

25. Leonard Scensny, Chicago Tribune, October 21, 2001.

26. Interview with Abdullah, May 8, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Interview with Rick Inderfurth, February 20, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

27. Interview with Marty Miller, September 23, 2002, Austin, Texas (SC and GW). Unocal's strategy, Robert Oakley said in an interview, had to be one of moderating the Taliban, drawing them out. "We felt it was worth a try. Most Afghans said, 'Look, they brought order. It's so much better than it was,' " Oakley said. Phyllis Oakley took over at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the fall of 1997 and was involved with discussions about how to handle the Taliban. The Taliban were constantly searching for approval from the United States, she said. She described the Taliban's basic position in talks with the U.S. government in this way: "If you recognize us and build an embassy, we'll be glad to work with you-except on these issues." The off-limits issues were women's rights and terrorism, however, so the conversations never made progress. Robert Oakley described Unocal's attempts to moderate the Taliban as "frustrating" and cited the influence of bin Laden and other Arab extremists as the major reason. Bin Laden and others showered the Taliban with money, weapons, and volunteers. "It was a lot more than Unocal could give."

28. Interview with Miller, September 23, 2002. Interview with Thomas Goutierre, September 18, 2002, Omaha, Nebraska (GW).

29. "Afghanistan: Meeting with the Taliban," State Department cable, December 11, 1997, released by the National Security Archive.

30. Interview with Goutierre, September 18, 2002.

31. Interview with Miller, September 23, 2002. Miller is the source of the dinner scene at his house.

32. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "World Threat Assessment," January 28, 1998. The 105-page transcript of Tenet's May 1997 confirmation hearing contains a serious discussion of terrorism only on page 103, and then only briefly, with no mention of bin Laden.

33. Al-Fadl testified about his efforts to purchase uranium for bin Laden in open court early in 2001 during the trial of defendants accused of acting on bin Laden's behalf in the August 1998 terrorist strikes against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The question of contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq is highly controversial, and the evidence about such contacts at this writing remains at best uncertain. In interviews with U.S. officials throughout the intelligence community, the author heard repeated accounts of evidence collected in Sudan during the period of bin Laden's exile there, which showed meetings between visiting midlevel Iraqi officers and Islamists in bin Laden's circle. This was in the context of many meetings among multinational radicals in Khartoum with varying secular and Islamist agendas. The purpose and seriousness of these contacts, if they did occur, is difficult to gauge. U.S. intelligence believed and reported at the time, according to some of these officials-long before the events of September 11 or the debate over Iraqi links to bin Laden-that bin Laden's group may have solicited these meetings to explore development of a chemical weapons expertise. Both Sudan's government and Iraq's government clearly were interested in chemical weapons capabilities, and bin Laden, for his part, was close to the Khartoum regime. Stanley Bedington, a senior analyst in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center until 1994, said in an interview, "The Iraqis were active in Sudan giving bin Laden assistance. A colleague of mine was chief of operations for Africa and knew it extremely well. He said the relationship between Sudan and the Iraqis was very, very close indeed. . . . Basically, the Iraqis were looking for anti-American partners and targets of opportunity in places like Sudan. . . . But his [Saddam's] regime is essentially secular. If al Qaeda has established links with Iraq, it's entirely opportunistic." Later, after bin Laden relocated to Afghanistan and al Qaeda grew in strength, bin Laden clearly did engage in chemical weapons experiments at camps there, although the extent of his progress and outside technical resources remain uncertain. The staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States reported in the spring of 2004 that Sudan arranged contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda during the mid-1990s, including a meeting between an Iraqi intelligence officer and bin Laden in 1994. These and other sporadic, mid-level contacts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," the staff reported. "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

CHAPTER 21: "YOU ARE TO CAPTURE HIM ALIVE"

1. This chapter's account of the CIA's tribal agents, how they were first recruited, how their plans evolved, how they interacted with CIA officers, and how their operations were debated at the White House and at Langley is drawn from interviews with eight American officials knowledgeable about the plans. Many cables and documentation of these episodes remain classified and were unavailable to supplement the recollections of officials. As best the author could discover, the earliest accurate public reference to the plans described in this chapter was a very brief mention in a September 6, 1998, New York Times article by James Risen. Barton Gellman, writing in The Washington Post on December 19, 2001, provided a fuller sketch of their activities. Bob Woodward first described the team's makeup and intelligence collection role in The Washington Post on December 23, 2001. None of these articles described the origin of the unit as a team to arrest Kasi, the plan to attack Tarnak Farm, the plan to kidnap bin Laden and hold him in a cave, or the extended debate over risks and casualties. On October 17, 2002, George Tenet testified at a Joint Inquiry Committee hearing that by 1998 the CIA was "pursuing a multi-track approach to bring bin Laden himself to justice, including working with foreign services, developing a close relationship with U.S. federal prosecutors, increasing pressure on the Taliban, and enhancing our capability to capture him."

2. "It's a match" is from Patricia Davis and Maria Glod, The Washington Post, November 14, 2002. Other background is from Davis and Thomas, The Washington Post, June 20, 1997, and Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, p. 340. The account here of how the CIA received the tip about Kasi, how the fugitive was betrayed by a business partner, how the arrest operation was planned, and the "Red Light Zulu" radio message to Langley are from interviews with U.S. officials.

3. CNN, June 18, 1997.

4. Here as elsewhere in the book the author has published the full names of active CIA officers in the clandestine service only if those names have already been made public. In a few cases elsewhere in the book only the first name of an officer is used or no name at all in order to protect the officer's professional and personal security.

5. See note 1. The quotations are from interviews with Gary Schroen, September 19 and November 7, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC). Clinton aides' approval from National Commission final report, p. 110.

6. The public record about the grand jury investigation of bin Laden is limited. Press accounts date the origins of the investigation to 1996, around the time the CIA opened its bin Laden unit. Former National Security Council counterterrorism officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, in The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 239, confirm what court records seem to indicate: that an indictment against bin Laden by the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, then Mary Jo White, was first filed under seal in June 1998. CIA officers probably learned informally of the investigation because of their close interaction with FBI agents who were gathering evidence against bin Laden for the grand jury.

7. This account is from interviews with U.S. officials involved in the Egyptian rendition program. Some of those rendered to Egypt during this period were placed on trial by Egyptian authorities in 1999. Islamist violence against tourists and foreign interests in Egypt climaxed during 1997. In November, Islamic Group gunmen shot to death about seventy tourists, mainly Swiss and Japanese, at the Hatshepsut Temple in Luxor, Egypt.

8. Michael W. Reisman and James E. Baker, Regulating Covert Action, pp. 123-30. Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 116-17. During the 1980s, under a ruling by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. agents had "no law enforcement authority in another nation unless it is the product of that nation's consent." In 1989 this standard was overturned by the Justice Department in favor of a new rule that authorized the executive branch to "violate the territorial sovereignty of other states" while making certain arrests abroad. As Reisman and Baker write, "Notwithstanding executive regulations and international norms against extraterritorial kidnapping, federal courts, until now, [have held] that once custody is obtained, the Court will not examine how a defendant was brought to the dock unless it involved conduct that 'shocks the conscience.' " These standards continue to evolve as fresh cases of fugitives abducted overseas and returned to American courts are reviewed on appeal.

9. Quotations are from interviews with Gary Schroen, September 19 and November 7, 2002 (SC).

10. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 26.

11. Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, August 23 and 25, 1998. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 95-96.

12. The most thorough and balanced biography of al-Zawahiri yet published in English appeared as a long article in The New Yorker by Lawrence Wright on September 16, 2002.

13. Higgins and Cullison, in The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002, drawing from draft letters from al-Zawahiri to fellow Islamists that were discovered on the hard drive of a computer left behind in Kabul. The article makes plain the Egyptian's disputatious nature and growing isolation. So does a careful reading of al-Zawahiri's own post-September 11 memoir, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner; extracts were published in the Arabic newspaper Al- Sharq al-Awsat. In his memoir al-Zawahiri takes credit for a number of lethal terrorist operations prior to his formal alliance with bin Laden, including the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.

14. Higgins and Cullison, The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002, describe al-Zawahiri's itinerant travels and his fortunate escape from Russian custody in Dagestan. If the Russians had identified him correctly while he was in jail, it is possible that al Qaeda might have developed during the late 1990s in a different way.

15. Al-Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. The memo was released by the office of Senator Jon Kyl and was described by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, February 25, 1998.

19. "Report of the Accountability Review Board," January 8, 1999. This was the commission led by Adm. William Crowe (Ret.) that reviewed the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 and the warnings that had preceded them.

20. March 9 meeting and quotation from "Afghanistan: [Redacted] Describes Pakistan's Current Thinking," State Department cable declassified and released by the National Security Archive.

21. Interview with Bill Richardson, September 15, 2002, Albuquerque, New Mexico (GW).

22. All quotations, ibid. Richardson's recollections are supported by Rick Inderfurth and the U.S. ambassador to Islamabad at the time, Tom Simons, both of whom accompanied him.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. All quotations, ibid. Inderfurth and Simons were also at the table with Rabbani and recall the discussion similarly.

26. Interview with Rick Inderfurth, March 6, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

27. Interview with Tom Simons, August 19, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

28. Ibid.

29. Quotation from Jonathan Landay, Christian Science Monitor, July 1, 1998.

30. Timothy Weiner, The New York Times, February 1, 1999.

31. "To the extent of brainwashing" and other details are from the interview with Richard Clarke, July 9, 2003, Washington, D.C. (SC). Useful profiles of Clarke's career include Landay, Christian Science Monitor; Weiner, The New York Times; and Michael Dobbs,The Washington Post, April 2, 2000. The descriptions of Clarke's character and style are also drawn from interviews with about a dozen colleagues who worked closely with him during the late 1990s.

32. Interviews with former Clinton administration officials.

33. "Paranoid" and "facilitate" are from USA Today, May 22, 1998. That his status as a principal was unprecedented for an NSC staffer is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 233. An account of PDD- 62's provisions and significance is offered by Perl, "Terrorism, the Future, and U.S. Foreign Policy," Congressional Research Service, September 13, 2001, and is described in the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 234.

34. Clinton's bioterrorism session in April is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, p. 252. "Electronic Pearl Harbor" is from Weiner, The New York Times, February 1, 1999. "Pile driver" from National Commission staff statement no. 8, p. 3.

35. Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post, April 2, 2000.

36. Jonathan Landay, Christian Science Monitor, July 1, 1998.

37. Descriptions are from the author's visit, October 2002, and interviews with local residents.

38. Interview with Gary Schroen, September 19, 2002. Clarke email and Schroen cable from National Commission, final report, p. 112.

39. Ibid.

40. National Commission final report, pp. 112-114.

41. The nuclear weapons quotations are from Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 100. The ABC News quotations are from The Washington Post, April 23, 1998, and September 16, 2001.

42. Benjamin and Simon, Clarke's principal deputies for counterterrorism, write in their memoir that "there was nothing like a workable plan."

43. National Commission final report, p. 114.

CHAPTER 22: "THE KINGDOM'S INTERESTS"

1. Quotation from Prince Sultan bin Salman, son of the governor of Riyadh, from Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, p. 138.

2. Bin Laden described the January arrests of his Saudi followers at his May 1998 press conference. He said they possessed an American Stinger missile and a number of SA-7 surface-to-air missiles. See Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 100-101. The defection of Moisalih and the arrests in Saudi Arabia it produced are from "Afghanistan: Crisis of Impunity," Human Rights Watch, July 2001, p. 33. Turki has given half a dozen press interviews about his mission to Kandahar in June 1998. He provided an early detailed account to the Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1999.

3. Abdullah's routine is from interviews with senior Saudi officials. His demeanor, palaces, and appearance are from an interview with Crown Prince Abdullah, January 28, 2002, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (SC).

4. Interviews with senior Saudi officials.

5. One American counterterrorism official called Naif 's Interior Ministry a "black hole" into which requests for names, telephone numbers, and other details usually disappeared, never to reemerge. Turki's tent accident was described by several U.S. officials.

6. Sheikh Turki's presence is from interviews with senior Saudi officials. His presence was also described by Intelligence Newsletter, October 15, 1998.

7. Turki's assessment of Mullah Omar, al Qaeda membership, and bin Laden's leadership role are from an interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC).

8. "Briefed . . . kingdom's interests" is from the Associated Press, December 23, 2001, quoting Turki's interview with the Arabic-language satellite television network MBC. "We made it plain" is from Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1999.

9. The Turki interview was on ABC News Nightline, December 10, 2001.

10. Rashid, Taliban, p. 72, describes Turki's meeting with Omar as focused entirely on the upcoming Taliban military thrust against Northern Alliance forces in Mazar-i-Sharif. Saudi officials denied this was a subject of discussion. The only publicly available accounts of the meeting are from Turki and Mullah Omar. The Taliban leader told Time magazine on August 24, 1998, that Turki had told him to keep bin Laden quiet. Omar made no reference to a Saudi request to hand bin Laden over for trial. Instead, after hearing from Turki, Omar said he told bin Laden "that as a guest, he shouldn't involve himself in activities that create problems for us."

11. Biographies and Afghan training of el Hage, Odeh, and Mohammed are from opening statements by their defense lawyers at their trial in the Southern District of New York, February 5, 2001.

12. Casualty statistics and attack sequences are from "Report of the Accountability Review Boards: Bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998," released on January 8, 1999.

13. Ibid. The July 29 CTC warning is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 20. The review board's investigators examined classified intelligence and threat warnings circulated prior to the attacks and found "no immediate tactical warning" about the embassy bombings. The board did not blame either the CIA or the FBI for failing to discover bin Laden's Africa cells. They did criticize the heavy dependence on fragmentary and often inaccurate threat warnings as the primary guidance system for security measures at U.S. embassies. "We understand the difficulty of monitoring terrorist networks and concluded that vulnerable missions cannot rely upon such warning," the board wrote. "We found, however, that both policy and intelligence officials have relied heavily on warning intelligence to measure threats, whereas experience has shown that transnational terrorists often strike without warning at vulnerable targets in areas where expectations of terrorist acts against the U.S. are low." In the Africa cases, the earlier CIA and FBI efforts to track and disrupt el Hage's activities in Nairobi had lulled the agencies into a false belief that they had broken up the local cells. Also, the State Department ignored repeated warnings from the U.S. ambassador to Nairobi, beginning in December 1997, that the chancery building was too close to a major street and was therefore vulnerable to just the sort of truck bombing that eventually occurred.

14. Interviews with U.S. officials. Tracking the African cells, ibid.

15. Interview with a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the woman's reaction.

16. Interviews with multiple senior Clinton administration officials.

17. Interviews with participants. "Intelligence from a variety" is from Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 100-101. "Spoke pretty clearly . . . confidence" is from an interview with a Clinton administration official. "The first compelling . . . Americans" is from an interview with a senior Clinton administration official who spoke to Clinton about the incident in 2003.

18. Interviews with Clinton administration officials. Berger's view about military options is from testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. "I don't think there was anybody in the press calling for an invasion of Afghanistan" in August 1998 or at any point afterward, Berger testified. "I just don't think that was something [where] we would have diplomatic support; we would not have had basing support." Clinton's quotation, "As despicable . . . support us" is from an interview with a senior Clinton administration official.

19. Tenet's briefing that day is from Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, October 21, 1999. See also the chronology provided on the day the missile strikes were announced by Madeleine Albright, transcript of press conference, August 20, 1998, Federal News Service.

20. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 358. National Commission staff investigators later reported that they found "no evidence that domestic political considerations entered into the discussion or decision-making process" during this period.

21. Interviews with two Clinton administration officials familiar with the Pentagon's targeting work, which seems to have begun around the time of bin Laden's May press conference and his threat-filled interview with ABC News, which was broadcast in the United States a few weeks later.

22. Interviews with multiple Clinton administration officials. The Zinni quotation is from Bob Woodward and Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post, October 3, 2001. In Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 107, the CIA's Pillar wrote, "Intelligence about a scheduled meeting of bin Laden and other terrorist leaders . . . determined the timing of the attack." See also the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 297.

23. Gul's claim from National Commission, staff report no. 6, p. 6. Hussain's account from interview with Mushahid Hussain, May 21, 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan (SC).

24. Ibid.

25. Interviews with U.S. and Pakistani offi- cials involved in the episode, including the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at the time, Tom Simons, August 19, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Some published accounts have suggested that Ralston told Karamat directly at dinner that the cruise missiles were in the air. But one U.S. official familiar with the event said that in fact Ralston was not so forthcoming, telling Karamat only in general terms that a "retaliatory action" was being planned by the United States. By this account Ralston left Pakistani airspace before the missiles arrived, infuriating Karamat who felt the Americans had failed to take him adequately into their confidence. Sharif, meanwhile, was angry that the United States talked directly to the army about the attack rather than to Pakistan's supposedly supreme civilian authority, and he was also angry at Karamat, believing that the general had deceived him or let him down. When Pakistani authorities learned that two of the missiles had fallen short and hit inside Pakistani territory, they denounced the attack in public and in private.

26. Interviews with Clinton administration officials. Also Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy.

27. Quotation from an interview with a senior Clinton administation official. The secret Blair House exercise in July is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 254-55.

28. "Terrorist war" is quoted by Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002. "I think it's very important" is from The Washington Post, August 22, 1998. "You left us with the baby" is from The Washington Post, September 2, 1998.

29. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 103 and 107.

30. Tenet's quotations are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 21. Slocombe memo and Clarke forecast from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 3.

31. That Rana came along and an ISI officer translated is from an interview with a senior Saudi official.

32. Ibid.

33. The Omar quotations are from Prince Turki, ABC News Nightline, December 10, 2001.

34. Interview with a senior Saudi official. Speaking to the Associated Press on November 23, 2001, Turki quoted himself similarly: "I told him, 'You will regret it, and the Afghan people will pay a high price for that.' " See also National Commission, staff statement no. 5, pp. 9-10, which reports that Turki returned to Kandahar in June 1999 on a similar mission, "to no effect."

35. Interviews with U.S. officials.

CHAPTER 23: "WE ARE AT WAR"

1. In an early speech after becoming DCI, written to answer the question "Does America Need the CIA?," Tenet described the agency as the country's "insurance policy" against strategic surprise. Text of the speech from November 19, 1997, CIA Office of Public Affairs.

2. Interviews with Clinton administration officials. One recalled his reaction to the Africa bombings this way: "I'm at the White House, so I'm thinking two things: One is the venal thought that it is not good for the president to have embassies blowing up, so probably we want to limit that. And the other is that deterrence really depends on these kinds of things not happening, and that's really important for the exercise of U.S. power."

3. "A tendency . . . attention and resources" is from Paul R. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, pp. 115-16.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials. David Benjamin and Steven Simon highlighted the White House complaints about unedited intelligence in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror. The East Africa bombings, they wrote, "had a catalytic effect on CIA stations, foreign intelligence services, and it seemed, everyone who had ever peddled information" (p. 261). The CIA "gave Clinton substantial amounts of threat information that did not require presidential attention" (p. 265).

5. "No double standards" is from interviews with U.S. officials. Benjamin and Simon estimate that "scores" of embassies were closed for at least brief periods during the last months of 1998 and the first months of 1999.

6. Summaries of classified aviation threat reports in the fall of 1998 are from Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

7. Ibid., and interviews with U.S. officials. See also the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 23.

8. Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

9. That the submarine order was closely held, that Tarnak coordinates were preloaded, what Clinton made clear to his senior aides, and that exercises reduced decision-to-target time to about four hours are all from interviews with U.S. officials involved. Delenda Plan and Steinberg quotation from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, pp. 3-4, and no. 8, p. 4.

10. The account that follows is based mainly on interviews with multiple participants. Staff investigators from the National Commission have helpfully corrected two errors in the account of this episode in the first edition of Ghost Wars: It occurred in December 1998, not September; and decision-makers feared hitting a mosque, not a hospital. See staff statement no. 6, p. 7.

11. Clinton's outlook and Clarke's advice from interviews with multiple senior Clinton administration officials involved in the discussions.

12. The Berger quotation is from testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002.

13. That Berger's standard was "significant" or "substantial" probability of success is from interviews with Clinton administration officials.

14. The account in this section of the MONs signed by Clinton is from interviews with multiple officials familiar with the documents. Barton Gellman published the first account of the memos in The Washington Post, December 19, 2001. The account here differs from his in a few details. According to officials interviewed by the author, Clinton signed at least four MONs related to bin Laden. The first predated the Africa embassy bombings and authorized the use of force to detain or arrest bin Laden's international couriers, according to these officials. The second was drafted immediately after the embassy bombings and authorized snatch operations against bin Laden and certain of his lieutenants. The third was signed later that autumn and involved bin Laden's aircraft, as described in this chapter. A fourth was signed in late 1999 or early 2000 and involved the CIA's liaison with Massoud, as described in Chapter 25 and following. In addition to authorizing snatch operations by Massoud, Clinton specifically authorized the CIA's tribal team in southern Afghanistan, a Pakistani commando team, and an Uzbek commando team to carry out snatch operations using lethal force against bin Laden and his lieutenants. Whether the authorizations for each of these different strike forces required a separate MON or were handled by some other form of legal documentation is not clear to the author. All the documents re- main highly classified. "As smart as bin Laden . . . equally ruthless" is from Clinton's speech to the Democratic Leadership Council at New York University, December 6, 2002.

15. Baker is the coauthor of a legal book on these issues, Regulating Covert Action .

16. Interviews with U.S. officials.

17. Ibid.

18. Interviews with U.S. officials involved. "We wanted . . . be possible" is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 283.

19. The Hitz quotation is from an oped article he published in The Washington Post, September 15, 1998. Goss called the Directorate of Operations "gun-shy," according to the Associated Press, September 15, 1998.

20. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, confirmed the existence and conclusions of these opinions in testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee on September 19, 2002. "We received rulings in the Department of Justice," Berger said, "not to prohibit our ability-prohibit our efforts to try to kill bin Laden, because [the assassination ban] did not apply to situations in which you're acting in self-defense or you're acting against command and control targets against an enemy, which he certainly was."

21. The summary of the debate over law enforcement approaches to bin Laden is from interviews with multiple Clinton administration officials. Albright and Cohen quotations are from their written testimony to the National Commission, March 23, 2004.

22. Ibid. See note 14. Pentagon order from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 5.

23. "Written word . . . kettle of fish and much easier" is from an interview with a U.S. official involved. In testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee investigating the September 11 attacks, Cofer Black, who led the Counterterrorist Center after 1999, said in a statement, "Operational flexibility: This is a highly classified area. All I want to say is that there was a 'before' 9/11 and 'after' 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off." Divided planning in Pentagon from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 5. Clinton's changing language from final report, pp. 126-133.

24. "Unless you find him . . . get the job done" is from an interview with a Clinton administration official involved.

25. "It was no question" is from Berger's testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. "Any confusion" is from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 9.

26. Douglas Frantz, The New York Times, December 8, 2001.

27. Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 207.

28. Ibid., p. 208. The letter was solicited by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on South Asian affairs.

29. Interviews with multiple State Department officials from this period. Inderfurth summed up the department's policy in an interview: "The United States had been very involved, as had others, during the period of '79 through '89, choosing sides. What was needed now was not to choose sides but to get all parties to talk, and if we had chosen sides, our ability to press all sides to actually sit down would have been impaired. A lot of people that had dealt with Afghanistan over the years said, look, the Northern Alliance and those involved are virtually no better than those they're opposing." Inderfurth said he personally had the view that Massoud's alliance could not possibly be as bad as the Taliban, and among his colleagues "there would be people who would concede the point." The consensus within the State Department was, according to Inderfurth, "Look, we've gone down that road before. We do not want to become an active participant in the civil conflict; we want to try to bring them together."

30. Statement by Karl F. Inderfurth, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, October 8, 1998.

31. Quotations in this paragraph are from Clinton's speech at Georgetown University, November 7, 2001. "Painful and powerful . . . community" is from Clinton's speech to the British Labour Party conference at Blackpool, England, October 3, 2002. Arguably, both the Irish Republican Army and the Zionist movement that emerged after World War II achieved important political goals through terrorist violence-as did the Palestine Liberation Organization.

32. "Fanatics . . . value of life" is from Clinton's Blackpool speech, October 3, 2002.

33. "Take Mr. bin Laden" is from USA Today, November 12, 2001. "Reduce the risks . . . in the future" is from Clinton's Blackpool speech, October 3, 2002.

34. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy . "A challenge . . . solved," p. vii. "A war that cannot be won . . . to some degree controlled," pp. 217-18. The account in this section of the debates between Pillar on the one hand and Clarke's aides Simon and Benjamin on the other is drawn in part from multiple officials in several departments. Skepticism is due when participants seek to characterize their positions about a catastrophe like September 11 in the light of hindsight. In this case, however, it is possible to document the views of Pillar, Simon, and Benjamin without such colorizing. After he left the CIA's Counterterrorist Center in 1999, Pillar spent a year at the Brookings Institution where he synthesized his views and experiences into a book that was written and published just before the events of September 11. In the same period, after they left the White House, Simon and Benjamin collaborated on an article in the security journal Survival about terrorism and al Qaeda. In documenting their competing views here, I have relied solely on language composed by the participants before they had the benefit of knowing about September 11.

35. Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 120.

36. Ibid. "Often sensational public," p. 4. "Skewed priorities and misdirected resources," p. 203.

37. Paul R. Pillar, "Intelligence and the Campaign Against International Terrorism," in The Campaign Against International Terrorism, Georgetown University Press, forthcoming at the time of this writing. This article, unlike his work while at Brookings, was written after the September 11 attacks.

38. All of the quotations in this paragraph are from Pillar, Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 56.

39. Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, "America and the New Terrorism," Survival, Spring 2000, pp. 59-75.

40. Ibid.

41. That Tenet called the White House regularly to highlight specific bin Laden threat reports is from interviews with several Clinton administration officials.

42. Tenet's memo was cited and quoted by Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002. In congressional testimony that same day, Hill said Tenet's declaration of war inside the CIA was not widely known outside of Langley. "It was the DCI's decision," she said. "It was circulated to some people, but not broadly within the community." Awareness of the gravity of the bin Laden threat, she said, was greater among senior officials than among agents operating in the field. This was especially true at the FBI.

43. That bin Laden became a "Tier 0" priority is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 40. "In hindsight . . . there sooner," p. 42. "We never . . . Directorate of Intelligence," p. 41. "Never got to first base," p. 46.

CHAPTER 24: "LET'S JUST BLOW THE THING UP"

1. Interviews with senior Pakistani government officials.

2. Ziauddin's meetings with Sharif 's father in Lahore and his reputation as a political general are from interviews with both senior Pakistani and U.S. officials.

3. The CIA's plan to use ISI to set up bin Laden for ambush or capture is from interviews with U.S. officials. There are varying accounts of how American newspaper reporting caused bin Laden to stop using his satellite telephone in the autumn of 1998. The White House counterterrorism aides Benjamin and Simon cite a Washington Times story that reported bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones" as the triggering event. But there were other stories from the same period, including one inThe Washington Post that quoted former CIA officials and other analysts talking about bin Laden's use of telecommunications.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials.

5. Ibid.

6. "That those ISI individuals . . . didn't know what they were doing" is from an interview with a Clinton administration official. "The policy of the government . . . the overall policy of the government" is from an interview with a second U.S. official. "An incredibly unholy alliance . . . nuclear war in Kashmir" is from an interview with a third senior Clinton administration official.

7. Interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials.

8. The specific proposal to Ziauddin and his response are from an interview with a U.S. official.

9. Pakistan had paid for but never received American-made F-16 fighter jets at the time economic sanctions were imposed by the congressionally mandated Pressler Amendment in 1991. The original amount frozen was $658 million, but various forms of relief had reduced the amount to $501 million by December 1998, according to the United States. See Associated Press, December 2, 1998.

10. The time and duration of the Oval Office meeting, the Riedel quotation, and the order of Clinton's talking points are from the Federal Document Clearing House transcript of a briefing provided that afternoon by Riedel and Karl F. Inderfurth.

11. Ibid., and interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials.

12. Details about the Pakistani proposal are from interviews with U.S. officials. One U.S. official and one Pakistani official present vividly recall a discussion about a commando team at this White House meeting. However, evidence assembled by the National Commission suggests the plan was hatched only later, when Sharif met Clinton in July 1999. Either way, it seems clear that training did not begin in earnest until the summer of 1999.

13. Interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials present. "We tried to get the Pakistanis . . . political risk in getting him" is from USA Today, November 12, 2001.

14. What Sharif said at the lunch, including the joke about cruise missiles and the intelligence report on bin Laden's health, is from an interview with Mushahid Hussain, Sharif 's information minister during the visit, who was present at the luncheon, May 21, 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan (SC). U.S. officials also recall the report about bin Laden's health.

15. What Sharif, Albright, and Berger said over lunch is from the Riedel-Inderfurth briefing hours later. The words quoted are Inderfurth's.

16. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials.

17. "Since just telling us" is from an interview with a Clinton administration official.

18. "Had neither the ability nor the inclination" is from interviews with U.S. officials.

19. Interviews with Haji Habib Ahmad-zai and Sayed Khaled Ishelwaty, aides to Abdul Haq, May 14, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

20. Ibid. Interview with Peter Tomsen, January 21, 2002, Omaha, Nebraska (SC).

21. The account of the desert camp episode is based on interviews with seven U.S. officials familiar with the event. Several of the officials were interviewed multiple times about the episode. The National Commission's staff statement no. 6, p. 8, adds important public confirmation and precise dates. Barton Gellman, writing in The Washington Post of December 19, 2001, was the first to make public reference to the episode.

22. Mary Anne Weaver, "Of Birds and Bombs," APF Reporter, online at www.aliciapatterson.org.

23. That the U.A.E. effectively maintained a secret air base in northern Pakistan for hunting is from the author's interview with a U.S. official. After the events of September 11, Pakistan made the base available to the United States for clandestine use in its 2001 military campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban, this official said. It was only then that the U.S. learned of the arrangement between Pakistan and the U.A.E., the official said.

24. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, p. 201, describes the early contacts between Taliban leaders and Arab hunters in the winter of 1994-95. Unocal employees and consultants who watched bin Laden settle in Kandahar in the winter of 1996-97 said he had a local reputation as an avid falcon hunter.

25. Interviews with U.S. officials.

26. Ibid. The quotation is from an interview with Gary Schroen, November 7, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC).

27. Ibid.

28. AAP Newsfeed, May 13, 1998. Vice President Al Gore announced the agreement with Sheikh Zayed at the White House. Also, interviews with Clinton administration officials.

29. Interviews with U.S. officials.

30. Interview with Schroen, November 7, 2002.

31. "Wanted to cooperate . . . were properly understood" is from an interview by the author.

32. Interview with Schroen, November 7, 2002.

33. Interviews with U.S. officials. The quotation from Mike, although he is not identified even by his first name, appears on p. 237 of the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report.

34. Prepared testimony of George Tenet before the Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. Mike's cable quotation from National Commission final report, p. 140. Clinton quotations from Newsweek, April 18, 2002.

CHAPTER 25: "THE MANSON FAMILY"

1. Statement of the Director of Central Intelligence, Senate Armed Services Committee, "Current and Projected National Security Threats," February 2, 1999.

2. "Like two-year-olds" is from an interview with a U.S. official.

3. Ninety-seven-paragraph statement: "Current and Projected National Security Threats," February 2, 1999.

4. "Daunting impediments . . . pressure on bin Laden" is from the prepared testimony of George Tenet before the Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. Cofer Black made the same retrospective argument at these hearings: "Frankly, from an intelligence perspective, in order to have a fighting chance to protect this country from al Qaeda, we needed to attack the Afghan terrorist sanctuary protected by the Taliban. CIA appreciated this all too well. That is also why on 11 September we were ready and prepared to be the first boots on the ground."

5. "A new comprehensive plan . . . principal lieutenants" is from the prepared testimony of George Tenet before the Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002; details about intelligence collection goals are from interviews with U.S. officials.

6. Interviews with U.S. officials.

7. Ibid. During the Joint Inquiry Committee hearings, a dispute erupted between the committee's staff director, Eleanor Hill, and the CIA press office over the number of agency analysts who had been assigned to follow bin Laden and other terrorists prior to September 11. Hill said the CIA had only 3 analysts assigned to al Qaeda full-time at the Counterterrorist Center, a number that rose to 5 during 2000. The CIA argued that this selection of statistics vastly understated the number of analysts working on the bin Laden and terrorism target in other departments. In a press statement the agency said that 115 analysts throughout the agency worked on terrorism during this period and that the bin Laden unit directed 200 officers worldwide. It is hard to know how to evaluate this argument since all of the underlying statistics and personnel records remain classified. The estimate of 25 professionals working in the bin Laden unit in 1999, from interviews with U.S. officials, would include personnel assigned to the CIA from other agencies such as the FBI and the National Security Agency. The Joint Inquiry Committee's final report estimated there were "about 40 officers from throughout the Intelligence Community" assigned to the unit prior to September 11, 2001. The statistics about average experience and "take direction from the ladies" is from the final report, p. 64.

8. Ibid. All quotations are from the author's interviews.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid. "We are at war . . . his operations" from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, pp. 26-27.

11. The 30 percent cut in operating budget and the statistics about Directorate of Operations personnel during the 1990s are from the testimony of Cofer Black before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 26, 2002. Black said he had to allocate only "as many people as three infantry companies" across all the targets tracked by the Counterterrorist Center. Some of these groups, such as Hezbollah, which in 1999 had killed more Americans than al Qaeda, required substantial resources, Black said. Overall, Black testified, "We did not have enough people, money, or sufficiently flexible rules of engagement." Congressional investigators later criticized Black's plan to confront bin Laden for "an absence of rigor in the planning process."

12. The account of the Tashkent bombing and its aftermath is from The Washington Post, February 17, 1999, and Ahmed Rashid, The New Yorker, January 14, 2002. Rashid reported in this excerpt from his book Jihad that the Tashkent bombings allegedly were organized in the United Arab Emirates.

13. Interviews with U.S. officials.

14. Details of Karimov's cooperation and the attitude of the CIA, ibid. Clinton administration officials from the Pentagon and State were equally enthusiastic about the liaison. General Anthony Zinni, the Marine general who then ran Central Command, led the Pentagon's charge into Central Asia, flying there repeatedly for meetings with his counterparts and developing military-to-military cooperation. Albright and FBI Director Louis Freeh also traveled to Tashkent within a year of the February 1999 car bombings.

15. Interviews with Clinton administration officials. Quotations are from interviews with two different officials.

16. Interview with Qayum Karzai, May 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

17. Interview with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (SC).

18. Ibid., and interviews with U.S. officials.

19. Ibid.

20. Inderfurth testimony before Senate Appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, "Afghanistan Today: The U.S. Response," March 9, 1999.

21. Interviews with State Department officials involved in the discussions.

22. Pickering's argument, ibid.

23. Massoud's outlook during this period, phone calls with Mullah Omar, and back-channel meetings with Taliban representatives are from multiple interviews with Massoud aides and relatives. Interviews with his foreign policy adviser, Abdullah, May 8, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan, and February 26, 2003, Washington, D.C. (GW), and Ahmed Wali Massoud, May 7, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Also multiple interviews with senior intelligence aides to Massoud during this period.

24. Interviews with State Department officials. Interview with Karl "Rick" Inderfurth, May 7, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Defending this policy, Inderfurth said, "It was very clear in the discussions that we had with other countries that we would never support a Taliban regime taking control of the country, never recognize it until all of these various concerns were addressed-including terrorism, including human rights, including narcotics. . . . We also made it clear-whether it would be with the Russians or indeed with the Iranians-that it was important Massoud remain a viable opposition force. And that's all we needed to say."

25. "Statement by Karl Inderfurth," Tashkent, July 19, 1999. Also, "Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afhanistan."

26. Interview with Inderfurth, May 7, 2002.

27. Interviews with Massoud's advisers and aides; see note 23.

28. Interviews with multiple State Department and Clinton administration officials. Sheehan wrote a thirty-page classified memo during this period urging more pressure on U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan over the terrorism problem. The memo called Pakistan central to the problem and suggested that terrorism should be elevated as the primary issue in U.S.-Pakistan relations. The memo was ignored by senior State Department officials who believed nuclear proliferation and economic development had to remain near the top of the agenda with Pakistan. See The New York Times, October 29, 2001, and The Washington Post, December 20, 2001. Clinton's outlook on Pakistan is from a senior administration official who reviewed the subject with Clinton in 2003.

29. The account of the CIA's opening to Massoud and the Counterterrorist Center's initial trip to the Panjshir are from interviews with multiple U.S. officials as well as multiple interviews with intelligence and foreign policy advisers to Massoud.

30. Previous CIA payments to Massoud, after 1996, had been authorized from the Stinger recovery program. The October 1999 visit inaugurated a counterterrorism pro- gram that also produced cash stipends to Massoud from the CIA. Agency officers carried cash on multiple official visits after 1999. One official estimated the typical payment at $250,000; another recalled it was $500,000.

31. All quotations are from author's interviews. These sorts of exchanges reinforced a pattern of mutual suspicion between the Clinton White House and the CIA.

32. The language quoted is from interviews with U.S. officials. Without prompting, several officials in different areas of government used the same phrase in interviews when they described the policy guidance. A declassified sentence in a redacted section of the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report asserts: "The CIA was not authorized to upset the political balance in Afghanistan." What Clinton said about Massoud and what he recalled about the analysis he received at the time is from a senior administration official who reviewed the subject with Clinton in 2003. For the February memo, see National Commission final report, p. 139.

33. Interviews with U.S. officials and Massoud aides. As part of this network the CIA installed a secure phone in the suburban basement of Daoud Mir, Massoud's envoy in Washington. The network effectively put the CIA in real-time contact with Massoud agents who placed radio sets as far forward into Taliban territory as Kabul and Jalalabad, according to Massoud intelligence aides.

34. The quotation is from author's interview.

35. "American solution" is from an interview with a U.S. official.

36. Interview with Abdullah, February 26, 2003.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Interview with a senior intelligence aide to Massoud.

CHAPTER 26: "THAT UNIT DISAPPEARED"

1. The Taliban's role is inferred from court testimony provided by a Hamburg cell member who traveled to Kandahar immediately after the four described here. Mounir el- Motassadeq testified that Atta told him in February 2000 how to travel to Afghanistan for training and that his only instructions were to go to the Taliban office at an address in Quetta that Atta provided. When he got there, Motassadeq said, the Taliban did not ask why he had come; they arranged for him to travel to Kandahar.

2. The Atta biography is from McDermott, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002. Jarrah's biography is from Laabs and McDermott, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2003. Binalshibh's background is from The New York Times, February 10, 2003; Los Angeles Times,October 24, 2002; and Associated Press, September 14, 2002.

3. Interviews with U.S. officials. Testimony of George Tenet, Senate Intelligence Committee, February 2, 2000.

4. Interviews with U.S. officials.

5. The trial of Mounir el-Motassadeq and his conviction as an accessory in the September 11 attacks, held in Germany during the winter of 2003, produced the first courtroom evidence and witness statements documenting the birth and growth of the Hamburg cell. McDermott (see note 2) and Peter Finn in The Washington Post have published rich interview-based biographies of Atta, Jarrah, Zammar, and others. CIA and FBI reporting about Zammar is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, pp. 29-30.

6. Swanson and Crewdson, Chicago Tribune, February 20, 2003, reported that "police records" they obtained showed that "among the numbers called were three belonging to radical Saudi clerics. . . . The calls occurred soon after the three clerics-Nasser al-Omar, Safar al-Hawali, and Saman al-Auda-were freed in 1999." The calls were reportedly placed from a phone belonging to Motassadeq.

7. "A house of study . . . attached to his mother" is from McDermott, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2002. "Raising him as a girl" is from The New York Times, October 10, 2001. "Almost tricked him" and "embodied the idea of drawing" are from McDermott.

8. "Danger" is from The Washington Post, July 15, 2002. "The victors will come . . . paradise is rising" is from Laabs and McDermott, Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2003.

9. National Commission staff statement no. 16, pp. 2-4, 13-14, 18-19.

10. Ibid.

11. Chicago Tribune, February 26, 2003.

12. The information on Musharraf 's family is from The New Yorker, August 12, 2002.

Musharraf 's attitude toward the Taliban is from an interview with Pervez Musharraf, May 25, 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan (SC), and interviews with Pakistani and U.S. officials who talked regularly with Musharraf.

13. "He took off his commando jacket" and "Down to earth" are from The New Yorker, August 12, 2002.

14. What the embassy pieced together is from interviews with U.S. officials. Also, Bruce Riedel, "American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit at Blair House," Center for Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania, Policy Paper Series 2002.

15. That Musharraf briefed Sharif and that Sharif approved is from multiple sources including U.S. officials. This remains a subject of controversy among some Pakistani commentators and political figures.

16. That the information was obtained from cables from Islamabad and a dozen secret letters from interviews with U.S. officials. Reports of Pakistan preparing its nuclear arsenal for possible use is from Riedel, "American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit." Riedel, then at the National Security Council, cites one "well-informed assessment" which concluded that a Pakistani strike on Bombay alone with a small weapon "would kill between 150,000 and 850,000." Clinton's June 19 letter is from Madeleine Albright's written testimony to the National Commission, March 23, 2004.

17. Riedel, ibid. "Sharif seemed to be hedging his bet on whether this would be a round trip."

18. Ibid.

19. Interview with Mushahid Hussain, May 21, 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan (SC).

20. "I want to help you" is from an interview with a U.S. official. "A pretty good standard . . . intelligence for action" is from an interview with a second U.S. official.

21. Riedel, "American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit."

22. Ziauddin with Pickering is from an interview with a U.S. official. The October 7 meeting between Ziauddin and Omar is from Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, p. 233, and interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials.

23. That Ziauddin ordered the CIA-trained commandos to protect Sharif from a coup is from an interview with a U.S. official familiar with detailed American intelligence reporting on the incident.

24. The account here of Ziauddin, the Tenth Corps, and the end of the CIA-funded commando unit is from interviews with seven U.S. officials. Some accounts of the coup published in South Asia and elsewhere have speculated that Musharraf moved against Sharif to block Ziauddin from ending ISI's support for the Taliban-that it was ISI, in effect, that created the coup. But Ziauddin was too weak a figure to be much of a threat. Besides, the evidence makes clear that Musharraf was not actively planning a coup in early October. Otherwise, he would not have taken a working vacation to Sri Lanka. It was Sharif who brought his own reign down by misjudging his support in the army and with ISI's rank and file when he tried to fire Musharraf.

25. The New Yorker, August 12, 2002.

26. Interview with a U.S. official.

27. Interview with a senior Pakistani official close to Musharraf.

28. Interview with Thomas Pickering, April 24, 2002, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC). "Diverted the discussion . . . return to democracy" is from an interview with a second Clinton administration official. A central player in the U.S. relationship with Musharraf, both during the Kargil crisis and after the coup, was the American Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, then commander-in-chief of CENTCOM. Early in 2000, while traveling in Central Asia, Zinni told Dana Priest of The Washington Post, "If Pakistan fails, we have major problems. If Musharraf fails, hardliners could take over, or fundamentalists, or chaos. We can't let Musharraf fail."

29. Interview with David Boren, September 16, 2002, Norman, Oklahoma (GW).

30. Testimony of George Tenet, Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002, and the committee's final report, Appendix, p. 29.

31. "So great was the fear" is from Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, p. 311.

32. Judith Miller, The New York Times, January 15, 2001.

33. The information regarding Berger's meetings is from his testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. "Operations we knew . . . early January 2000" is from testimony of an unidentified "senior officer" of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 20, 2002.

34. The account of the cash and course notes is from The Seattle Times, June 28, 2002.

35. Clinton's call to Musharraf is from an interview with a senior U.S. official who reviewed notes of the conversation. Milam is from National Commission final report, p. 176.

36. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 31-32.

37. Interview with Cofer Black, September 13, 2002 (SC).

38. "Provided a kind of tuning fork . . . what they were doing" is from testimony of the Counterterrorist Center officer, September 20, 2002.

39. Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff report, September 20, 2002.

40. Interview with Cofer Black, September 13, 2002. National Commission, Staff Statement no. 2, p. 4.

41. Eleanor Hill report, September 20, 2002.

42. Ibid.

43. Tenet's testimony, October 17, 2002. In her independent review of this failure, Eleanor Hill concluded that the CIA's "practice for watch listing was often based upon an individual officer's level of personal experience with, and understanding of, how other government agencies received and used this information. There also may have been too much emphasis on making certain there was a minimum fixed amount of information on an individual before he or she was watch listed."

44. Eleanor Hill report, September 20, 2002.

45. For a full account of how the Malaysia plotters were connected to the plans eventually carried out on September 11, see National Commission staff statement no. 16, which draws on interrogation statements of al Qaeda leaders in U.S. custody.

46. Testimony of George Tenet, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, February 2, 2000.

47. Tenet testimony, October 17, 2002.

48. Ziad Jarrah was detained by authorities in the United Arab Emirates in January 2000 for an irregularity in his passport. But the CIA was not involved in this incident in any way, and the detention did not lead to any surveillance or further action, according to Eleanor Hill of the Joint Inquiry Staff.

CHAPTER 27: "YOU CRAZY WHITE GUYS"

1. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials and aides to Massoud familiar with the intelligence collection efforts at Derunta. After September 11, documentary evidence surfaced that confirmed al Qaeda's interest in chemical weapons. The hard drive of a computer used by Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul showed that around the summer of 1999 he exchanged notes with bin Laden's military commander, Mohammed Atef, about how to build a laboratory for what they called the "yogurt" program. This was a modest effort with an initial budget of only $2,000. Documents found by journalists at Rishikor, an al Qaeda camp used by Uzbeks and others outside of Kabul, described a curriculum with a section on the manufacture of "major poisons and gases," including ricin and cyanide. SeeThe Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002, and The New York Times, March 17, 2002.

2. "What do you think this is?" is from an interview with a U.S. official. "We're on mules" is from an interview with a second U.S. official.

3. Interviews with two U.S. officials.

4. Ibid.

5. Interview with a senior aide to Massoud who was involved with the CIA liaison. Speaking of the events of September 11, the adviser continued: "Those who criticize the security agencies in the United States for the loss of life, property, and suffering, they are wrong. They have to criticize the law, they have to criticize the people who really restricted, people with knowledge to do something." All quotations from American officials in the previous four paragraphs are from the author's interviews with senior officials directly involved. After September 11, Clinton's White House aides and CIA officers at Langley offered almost opposite views about the impact of the legal guidance on covert operations with Massoud and others. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who was primarily responsible for the classified legal authorizations, testified to the Joint Inquiry Committee: "We were not pursuing a law enforcement model. . . . We were trying to kill bin Laden and his lieutenants." Berger cited the president's willingness to fire cruise missiles at bin Laden-if the Saudi could be reliably located-as evidence of this intent. But at the same hearings Cofer Black emphasized that White House rules had inhibited CIA operations, especially those with proxy forces such as Massoud. "We did not have . . . sufficiently flexible rules of engagement," he said. Asked if the United States should "consider revoking the prohibition against the use of lethal force" in counterterrorist operations, Black replied, "Yes."

6. "Relationship . . . minor issue," from an interview with an intelligence aide to Massoud. The perception of a double standard in American policy toward Massoud is from interviews with multiple aides and advisers.

7. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials. Quotations from Black's briefing documents are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, pp. 387-88. That unilateral reports outstripped liaison reports in 1999: Tenet's testimony before the Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. "By 9/11, a map would show that these collection programs and human networks were in place in such numbers as to nearly cover Afghanistan," Tenet testified. That CIA never penetrated bin Laden's leadership group prior to September 11 is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 91. "If the Drug Enforcement Administration can put actual, salaried American officers undercover in clannish narcotrafficking organizations in foreign countries, surely the CIA can learn to penetrate aggressively proselytizing Islamic fundamentalist organizations," Senator Richard Shelby complained of this failure in 2003.

8. Interviews with U.S. officials. Albright quotation from her written testimony to the National Commission, March 23, 2004.

9. Ibid. "Anytime . . . next day at noon" is from an interview with a U.S. official.

10. Ibid. Abdullah recalled receiving CIA satellite maps of the Uruzgan camp: interview with Abdullah, February 26, 2003, Washington, D.C. (GW).

11. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials. Details about the aborted attacks are in National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 4.

12. Interview with Zekrullah Jahed Khan, May 28, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). "Bin Laden's too hard" is from an interview with a U.S. official.

13. Quotations from interviews with U.S. officials.

14. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials and multiple intelligence aides to Massoud.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Interview with Hugh Shelton, October 31, 2002, Reston, Virginia. (SC). David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace, p. 414.

18. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 294-96. "We don't have Pakistan . . . likely to fail" is from Berger's testimony to the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002.

19. "All we had . . . sheikh is coming" is from an interview with a Pentagon official. Cohen quotations from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 5, and his written testimony, March 23, 2004.

20. That planners saw political and tactical problems operating near Pakistan is from the interview with Shelton, October 31, 2002.

21. "A standard military position . . . cannon fodder" is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 294-96. "It would scare the shit," ibid., p. 318. And interviews with U.S. officials.

22. Interview with Shelton, October 31, 2002.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., and interviews with Clinton administration officials.

25. Interviews with U.S. officials.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid. The quotation is from an interview with a Clinton administration official.

28. Ibid. The quotation is from the interview with Shelton, October 31, 2002.

29. Interview with Shelton, October 31, 2002. Also based on interviews with multiple Clinton administration officials. "We had a force . . . predicate to do it" is from an interview with Thomas Pickering, April 24, 2002, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC). That Berger noted sixty-seven Americans dead from terrorism during Clinton's presidency and that he saw no political context or support for an American war in Afghanistan is from his testimony to the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. Clarke memo and March meeting from National Commission staff statement no. 8, pp. 5-6.

30. Shelton quotation is from interview, October 31, 2002.

31. Interviews with U.S. officials.

32. The account of this meeting is from multiple American and Afghan officials present or familiar with reports of the discussion.

33. Interview with Abdullah, February 26, 2003.

CHAPTER 28: "IS THERE ANY POLICY?"

1. Hired Lanny Davis: The Washington Post, February 6, 2000. Mahmoud's role is from interviews with Pakistani and U.S. officials. See also Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, pp. 234-35.

2. Interviews with U.S. officials. Mahmoud's biography is also from Pakistani journalist Kamran Khan and Pakistani officials who worked with him.

3. Interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials.

4. The information about the renditions of Arab Islamists is from interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials. Officials from both sides recall that one of the suspects was a Jordanian with an American passport who eventually had to be released for lack of charges. "Actively considering" is from The Washington Post, February 4, 2000.

5. That Clinton overruled the Secret Service is from Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 317-18. Also, interview with Rick Inderfurth, May 7, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). The State Department itself documented the extraordinary expansion of al Qaeda-linked Kashmiri militants during Musharraf 's first year in office, in its report "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000," released in April 2001.

6. "First since Nixon" is from Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000, p. 356.

7. "We're going to show them . . . up in the air" is from the interview with Inderfurth, May 7, 2002.

8. Clinton on the plane is from Inderfurth, ibid. The scene on the tarmac is from Inderfurth, ibid.; and The Washington Post, March 26, 2000; and interviews with a Pakistani official who was present.

9. Interview with the Pakistani official quoted; all of the dialogue is from this official's recollection.

10. "Uncertain loyalties" is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 317-18.

11. Berger's recollections, ibid. Also, interview with a Pakistani official, and National Commission staff statement no. 5, pp. 13-14.

12. "Danger that Pakistan . . . no one can win" is from The Washington Post, March 26, 2000.

13. Interviews with U.S. officials.

14. Ibid. The quotation is from the author's interview with an official.

15. "Vacillated" is from the interview with Hugh Shelton, October 31, 2002, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC). "May hold the key" is from Anthony Zinni's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, February 29, 2000.

16. "People who do that . . . that position" is from Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, December 19, 2001, and from interviews with a U.S. and a Pakistani official. Reports about Taliban and bin Laden from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 10.

17. Tim Judah, "The Taliban Papers," Survival, pp. 69-80. Judah's important article makes use of Pakistani foreign ministry papers discovered in that country's looted embassy in Kabul immediately after the fall of the capital in the autumn of 2001.

18. Ibid. If the Pakistani documents are accurate-and Judah's reporting leaves little doubt that they are-then some or all of the CIA, National Security Council, and State Department officials Mahmoud met in April must have delivered these threats to endorse Russian aerial attacks and U.S. missile strikes against Taliban targets.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid. Written testimony of Louis Freeh to the National Commission, April 13, 2004. Tenet and Musharraf from National Commission final report, p. 503.

21. Interview with a Pakistani official who talked with Mahmoud during the spring of 2000. U.S. officials said they did not start to pick up on Mahmoud's reported religious conversion until the next year.

22. From an interview with the same Pakistani official.

23. Interviews with U.S. officials.

24. Ibid.

25. At least $3 million from accounts of the National Commercial Bank is from testimony of Vincent Cannistraro, House International Relations Committee, October 3, 2001; Boston Herald, October 14, 2001. That IIRO gave the Taliban $60 million is from its secretary-general, Adnan Basha, quoted in The Washington Post, September 29, 2001.

26. Sheehan's cable suppressed is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 294-95.

27. "Allegations . . . enforced consistently" is from the State Department's report "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000," April 2001. The conclusions of American investigators are from National Commission staff statement no. 15, p. 10.

28. Interview with Prince Turki, August 2, 2002, Cancun, Mexico (SC). "Did not effectively . . . liaison services" is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. xvii.

29. What Massoud believed in the summer of 2000 is from interviews with several of his senior aides. Massoud's supply lines are described in detail in "Afghanistan, Crisis of Impunity," Human Rights Watch, July 2001. The figure of $10 million from India is from an interview with a U.S. official familiar with detailed reporting about Massoud's aid. That figure is an estimate for one year of assistance from India in the 2000 time period. Ismail Khan's escape from a Kandahar prison is from Larry P. Goodson,Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 84. He had been held by the Taliban since 1997. Assistant Secretary of State Rick Inderfurth, testifying before a Senate Foreign Relations subcommitee in July 2000, also cited the April assassination of the Taliban-appointed governor of Kunduz as evidence of gathering dissent.

30. Interview with Abdullah, May 8, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW). Also, interview with a senior intelligence aide to Massoud.

31. Interview with Danielle Pletka, March 27, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW). Earlier in 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented Congress with a twenty-four-page statement titled "America and the World in the 21st Century." She devoted one sentence to Afghanistan and did not mention bin Laden by name.

32. Interviews with U.S. officials. The State Department provided several hundred thousand dollars during 2000 to aid efforts at political negotiations organized from exiled King Zahir Shah's offices in Rome. Squabbling among royal factions and slow progress disillusioned State officials, however, and the stipend was reduced the following year.

33. "Remarks by Karl F. Inderfurth," at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Tellingly, the hearing was entitled "The Taliban: Engagement or Confrontation?" The Congress as well as the Clinton administration could not make up its mind about that question.

34. Interviews with U.S. officials, including Gary Schroen, November 7, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC).

35. Ibid.

36. Interview with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (SC).

37. Interview with Afrasiab Khattak, May 23, 2002, Islamabad, Pakistan (SC).

38. Interviews with U.S. officials.

39. Ibid. The accounts of internal debates about travel to the Panjshir in this section are drawn primarily from interviews with four officials familiar with them.

40. Interview with a senior intelligence aide to Massoud.

41. Ibid.

CHAPTER 29: "DARING ME TO KILL THEM"

1. Details of discussions about new options in the hunt for bin Laden are from interviews with multiple U.S. officials. Berger testified about the memo he wrote to Clinton and dated it as February before the Joint Inquiry Committee on September 19, 2002.

2. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials. Clarke operated in a series of bureaucratic coalitions, and his ability to create policy or programmatic change on his own was limited. George Tenet was exceptionally alert to the al Qaeda threat, aggressively warned the White House about specific threat intelligence, and pushed for strong disruption efforts from the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. Tenet's role in key policy debates after 1998-whether to covertly arm the Northern Alliance, whether to arm the Predator-is less clear. Allen's comment is from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 5.

3. Details of the Eagle program are from an interview with Dewey Clarridge, December 28, 2001, Escondido, California (SC). Other CIA officials confirmed his account. A search of electronic news databases turned up no previously published account of the Eagle. Clarridge does not discuss it in his memoir.

4. Karem's background and role are from an interview with James Woolsey, February 20, 2002,Washington, D.C. (SC). See also Aviation Week and Space Technology, December 14, 1987; May 23, 1988; and June 20, 1988, for details of Amber's early history and design characteristics. Popular Science, September 1994, provides a history of the Predator to that point, including an account of Karem's role.

5. Interview with Thomas Twetten, March 18, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002. The information on Navy funding is from Aerospace Daily, January 28, 1994. Between its birth as Amber and its operational debut as Predator, the prototype drone was also called the Gnat.

6. Interviews with Woolsey, February 20, 2002, and Twetten, March 18, 2002. Interview with Whit Peters, May 6, 2002, Washington, D.C. (SC). The Air Force announced that the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron would operate Predators in July 1995,AerospaceDaily, July 31, 1995.

7. Twenty-four hours, five hundred miles, twenty-five thousand feet, and the Sony camera are from Popular Science, September 1994. The pilot profiles and roles of payload specialists in the van are from Air Force Magazine, September 1997, which profiled the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron. Also, interview with Peters, May 6, 2002.

8. Interview with Woolsey, February 20, 2002.

9. Debate about intelligence collection versus the kill chain is from interview with Peters, May 6, 2002, and interviews with multiple other U.S. officials. Navy test to link Predator to attack submarines is from Defense Daily, June 7, 1995. Laser targeting in Kosovo but not used is from the interview with Peters.

10. Interview with Thomas Pickering, April 24, 2002, Rosslyn, Virginia (SC). Interviews with multiple U.S. officials. What Clarke said is from an interview with a U.S. official.

11. Quotations from interviews with U.S. officials.

12. Barton Gellman first described the INF treaty debate in The Washington Post, December 19, 2001. The account here is also from interviews with U.S. officials.

13. Interviews with U.S. officials.

14. Interview with Peters, May 6, 2002. Interviews with other U.S. officials. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 322-23.

15. This account of the Predator proof of concept mission, including the scenes in the Langley flight center, is drawn from interviews with five U.S. officials familiar with the operation. All quotations are from author's interviews, except Clarke's exchange with Berger, from National Commission staff statement no. 8, p. 7.

16. Ibid. Benjamin and Simon provide an account of the autumn mission that includes the MiG incident, although they make no reference to the location of the flight center or the size and nature of the audience.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid. "The pilot will return" is from an interview with a U.S. official.

19. Interview with Peters, May 6, 2002. Interviews with multiple U.S. officials. Benjamin and Simon report that Peters resolved the problem in December 2000 by locating enough money to keep the Predator program going in Afghanistan.

20. Interviews with U.S. officials. Recalled one of these officials of the wind problem: "No matter how fast it was going, it would go backwards. So we had to stop. And the thought was, okay, we would begin again in March or April."

21. That there were long discussions of blast fragmentation patterns at Tarnak is from interviews with multiple U.S. officials. Tarnak's layout is from interviews and author's visit, October 2002.

22. Ibid. In 2001 the CIA watched as bin Laden moved his family and other civilians out of Tarnak and began to turn the compound into a military training camp. U.S. analysts concluded that bin Laden had finally realized he was being closely watched at Tarnak and it was not safe. In place of the laundry lines and children's swing he erected a military obstacle course and firing range.

23. Newsweek, April 8, 2002. Clinton made his comments in an interview with Jonathan Alter. "I don't care . . . people will die" is from Clinton's speech to the British Labour Party conference, October 3, 2002.

24. Interviews with U.S. officials. Also, Gellman, The Washington Post, December 19, 2001, and Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror. Said one White House official of Tenet's enthusiasm for the Predator images, "George, eventually, seeing the videotapes, decided this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And [now] it was his idea in the first place." Clinton's outlook and "strong and constant view" from an interview with a senior administration official who reviewed the subject with Clinton in 2003.

25. Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan's Endless War, p. 84. Human Rights Watch, "Crisis of Impunity," July 2001. The Human Rights Watch researchers reported that "the U.S. government was sufficiently concerned about the possibility of Pakistani involvement" in the capture of Taloqan "that it issued démarche to the Pakistani government in late 2000, asking for assurances that Pakistan had not been involved. The démarche listed features of the assault on Taloqan that suggested the Taliban had received outside assistance . . . including the length of preparatory artillery fire [and] the fact that much of the fighting took place at night." The CIA's $30 million estimate is from National Commission staff statement no. 15, p. 11.

26. The Washington Post, October 13, 2000; October 15, 2000; and June 19, 2001. What the CIA later concluded is from interviews with U.S. officials.

27. No specific tactical warning is from " Terrorist Attack on USS Cole: Background and Issues for Congress," Congressional Research Service, January 30, 2001. The Pentagon analyst resignation is from The Washington Post, October 26, 2000; and The New YorkTimes, October 26, 2000. Benjamin and Simon are from Age of Sacred Terror, p. 324. Zinni defended himself in testimony before a Senate subcommittee on October 19, 2000; see The Washington Post, October 20, 2000.

28. Sandy Berger testified to the Joint Inquiry Committee on September 19, 2002, that "when we left office, neither the intelligence community nor the law enforcement community had reached a judgment about responsibility for the Cole. That judgment was reached sometime between the time we left office and 9/11." National Commission staff reported that "the highest officials" of the Bush Administration received "essentially the same analysis" as the Clinton Cabinet did late in the year, showing that individuals linked to al Qaeda had been involved, but that proof of bin Laden's role was lacking. The State Department's annual report on global terrorism, culled from CIA and other intelligence community reports and published in April 2001, found "no definitive link" between the Cole attack and "bin Laden's organization." Berger and other Clinton officials cite the lack of a proven link as one reason that they did not launch military action against bin Laden or the Taliban before leaving the White House. However, interviews about the Massoud covert action proposal and other subjects debated during the late autumn of 2000 seem to make clear that for a variety of reasons, including unsettled national politics and a desire not to preempt the next president's options, Clinton and Berger had little interest in a parting military shot. Even without the establishment of definitive responsibility for the Cole attack, they might have found other ways to justify an attack if they had wanted to launch one. The Bush administration's early hesitancy about bin Laden and its causes are described in chapters 30 and 31.

29. Interviews with U.S. officials. All quotations are from the author's interviews.

30. The thirteen options and the quotations from Clarke and Shelton's operations chief are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, pp. 279 and 305-6. Albright quotation from her written testimony to the National Commission March 23, 2004.

31. Ibid.

32. From Black's testimony to the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 26, 2002.

33. Interviews with five U.S. officials familiar with the CIA's plan. The account of the plan's development in the next seven paragraphs is from those interviews.

34. The New York Times, January 16, 2001, first described the December 20 principals' meeting. That account emphasized discussions at the meeting about who was responsible for the Cole bombing. That the meeting also formally rejected the plan backed by Clarke and the CIA for covert aid to Massoud is from interviews with U.S. officials. "Roll back" from National Commission staff statement no. 8, p. 8.

35. "A bit . . . a capture operation" is from an interview with an intelligence aide to Massoud.

36. According to the interview with Schroen, September 19, 2002, Washington D.C. (SC), the seventh and last CIA liaison team to reach the Panjshir before September 11 exited during the early winter of 2001 when the helicopter was put into storage.

37. "You replay . . . formidable adversary" is from Clinton's response to a question during a speech at the Washington Society of Association Executives in October 2001, as quoted in USA Today, November 12, 2001.

CHAPTER 30: "WHAT FACE WILL OMAR SHOW TO GOD?"

1. That Bush never spoke in public about bin Laden or al Qaeda is from a search of the Lexis-Nexis electronic news database. It is conceivable that the author missed something, but the database is very extensive. The party platform is from www.rnc.org. "If a country is hosting . . . intelligence briefings" is from Bulletin Broadfaxing Network, Inc.'s transcript of a Fox News interview with Bush, October 12, 2000.

2. National Journal, May 4, 2000. Also recounted by Elaine Sciolino in The New York Times, June 16, 2000.

3. All quotations in this paragraph are from Sciolino, The New York Times, June 16, 2000.

4. Interview with former senator David Boren, September 16, 2002, Norman, Oklahoma (GW).

5. Ibid. All quotations are from Boren's conversation with Bush.

6. "An undetermined period . . . a later period" is from The New York Times, January 19, 2001.

7. "We are grateful . . . weapons of mass destruction" is from a Federal News Service transcript. The visit took place on March 20, 2001.

8. "Number one . . . the threat was" is from Berger's testimony to the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. What Berger said to Rice is from interviews with U.S. officials. See also Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, January 20, 2002, and Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 328-29.

9. That Clarke's office described the al Qaeda threat as "existential" is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 328-29. The CIA's annual threat assessment, delivered by Tenet, had also emphasized the primacy of the missile threat from rogue and hostile regimes; until 2001 this was the danger Tenet listed first in his public briefing. In testimony delivered on February 7, 2001, for the first time the CIA director listed al Qaeda first. Armitage's quotation is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 39.

10. Excerpts from this January 25 memo have been quoted in at least three published reports. Gellman, The Washington Post, January 20, 2002, cites "sleeper cells" and "a major threat in being." Benjamin and Simon, in Age of Sacred Terror, cite "urgently needed" and "this is not some little terrorist issue." See also National Commission staff statement no. 8, p. 9.

11. See note 10. The idea of "making a deal" with Musharraf and trading military rule for help on bin Laden was not described in the other published accounts of these exchanges; it is from interviews with U.S. officials.

12. "Was out there . . . lower on the list" is from Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 335-36. Rumsfeld's recollection is from National Commission, staff statement no. 6, p. 11.

13. Discussions of armed Predator testing and the "sensor to shooter" quotation are from interviews with U.S. officials. The missile struck the turret is from The New York Times, November 23, 2001, quoting a General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., press release issued at the time of the test.

14. Interviews with U.S. officials. See also Gellman, The Washington Post, January 20, 2002.

15. Interviews with U.S. officials. See also National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 6.

16. Ibid. "Oh these harebrained . . . a disaster" is from an interview.

17. In an extensive interview about U.S. policy toward Afghanistan on March 27, 2001, Eastham was asked to summarize U.S. policy toward the Taliban. "We have contacts with all the factions in Afghanistan," he said. "That includes the Taliban. We talk to the Taliban when we get the opportunity and when we have things to say, just as we talk to the representatives of the Northern Alliance, and just as we talk to representatives of the former king, of Afghan groups outside Afghanistan. We try to maintain contacts with all parts of Afghanistan." The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, March 27, 2001. Clarke, Rice, and Hadley from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 15.

18. Interviews with U.S. officials.

19. Ibid. "The prospect . . . fracture the Taliban internally" is from "Afghanistan: The Consolidation of a Rogue State" by Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Byman, The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2000.

20. The Republican platform said that the United States "should engage India" while being "mindful" about its relationship with Pakistan. Bush appointed Blackwill as his ambassador to India. Once in New Delhi, Blackwill pushed for a tougher U.S. policy toward Musharraf.

21. Letter exchange and Stalin quote are from an interview with a Pakistani official.

22. "We find practical reasons . . . refuse to cooperate" is from documents recovered in Pakistan's embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, after September 2001 and reported as "The Taliban Papers" by Tim Judah in Survival, Spring 2002, pp. 69-80. "Worst of both worlds" is from an interview with a Pakistani official. Quotations from Bush's letter from written testimony of Colin Powell to the National Commission, March 23, 2004.

23. Interviews with Pakistani officials involved in the discussions. "We are losing too much . . . serious about this" is from an interview with a Pakistani participant in the discussions. Omar's letter to Musharraf is from Judah, "The Taliban Papers," Survival.

24. After the United Nations passed another round of economic sanctions against the Taliban late in December 2000, Pakistan's foreign minister sat down with his Taliban counterpart to work out how to evade the sanctions without calling too much attention to themselves. According to minutes of the meeting discovered by Tim Judah in Kabul, Mullah Omar's foreign envoy, Muttawakil, confessed that "the Taliban are not very optimistic of the new Bush administration," because they believe that Bush and Clinton are "like two hands of one person." The Pakistani minister mentioned his nervousness about Zalmay Khalilzad who had suggested Pakistan "should be declared a terrorist state." The Pakistani envoy assured the Taliban that his government "had no intention of downgrading the Afghan embassy" in Islamabad as U.N. sanctions required, although "it would be desirable to show some superficial reduction to exhibit compliance." In another cable discovered by Judah, which provided talking points for Pakistani ambassadors to use in defending the Taliban, the foreign ministry urged, "We should avoid any statements that may be offensive to the Taliban." Judah, "The Taliban Papers," Survival.

25. Statue descriptions are from Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light, pp. 336-37. "We do not understand . . . are stones" is from Molly Moore, The Washington Post, March 2, 2001. According to Ramzi Binalshibh, several Saudis who were to become "muscle" hijackers on September 11 participated in the destruction. See National Commission final report, p. 527.

26. This account of Haider's visit to Kan- dahar is from interviews with Pakistani and U.S. officials. All quotations are from an interview with a Pakistani official. Time, August 12, 2002, provides a similar account of the meeting, which lasted about two hours, according to those interviewed.

27. Interviews with U.S. officials.

28. Ibid.

29. The surge in threat reporting during the first three months of 2001 is from interviews with U.S., Pakistani, and Saudi officials. Tenet's quotations are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 38. Turki said in an interview that he was "inundated by warnings from the Americans. January, February, March.We'd get reports telling us, 'We suspect something is going to happen. Please keep on the lookout.' " Pakistani officials quoted Tenet similarly. Bin Laden's remarks about the Cole,videotaped that winter at an Afghan wedding where one of his sons married a daughter of his Egyptian commander Mohammed Atef, binding their families, were broadcast on al Jazeera on March 2, 2001. "In Aden, the young man stood up for holy war and destroyed a destroyer feared by the powerful." He described Cole as having sailed "to its doom" along a course of "false arrogance, self-conceit, and strength." Rice and Tenet's exchanges on draft CIA covert action authority is from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 7. Bush's recollection from the final report, p. 199.

30. Interviews with Pakistani officials. "Because we'd have a civil war" is from an interview.

31. Interviews with U.S. officials.

32. Tenet's visit to Islamabad is from interviews with U.S. and Pakistani officials. Some of the sources who described the visit did not attend all the meetings. The full agenda and scope of the discussions with Mahmoud remain unclear, but it is certain that Mahmoud did little in the aftermath to change ISI's policies and practices in Afghanistan. The exact date of Tenet's travel is also uncertain. His visit appears to have occurred in late March or April.

CHAPTER 31: "MANY AMERICANS ARE GOING TO DIE"

1. Otilie English began paid work as a Northern Alliance lobbyist on February 15, 2001. The letter to Cheney is from an interview with Haroun Amin, chargé d'affaires at the Afghan embassy in Washington, September 9, 2002 (GW). Information on Massoud's travels is from interviews with his aides. What Massoud believed that spring is from videotaped conversation with English and Elie Krakowski, June 2001 (hereafter "English video"), and transcript of videotaped conversation among Massoud, Peter Tomsen, Hamid Karzai, and Abdul Haq, also from June 2001 (hereafter "Tomsen video").

2. Interviews with U.S. officials and aides to Massoud.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002.

6. English video, interviews with multiple aides to Massoud.

7. English video and Tomsen video.

8. All quotations are from the English video. The translation from Dari is by Massoud's aide Amarullah Saleh.

9. All of Massoud's quotations, ibid.

10. Interview with Otilie English, September 3, 2002, Washington, D.C. (GW).

11. Interview with Peter Tomsen, January 21, 2002, Omaha, Nebraska (SC), and subsequent written communications from Tomsen.

12. All quotations are from an English transcript of the Tomsen video. Abdul Haq's role in the meeting was a source of some tension. Haq did not want to meet with Massoud inside Northern Alliance territory. Haq and Hamid Karzai also disagreed somewhat about strategy toward the Taliban, according to Massoud and Karzai aides. Haq believed it was possible to negotiate with Taliban leaders and secure defections. Karzai favored talks but also was ready to participate in military action. Ultimately, Haq died because he believed he could rally Pashtuns in eastern Afghanistan to his cause in October 2001 simply by calling on their tribal and personal loyalties. The CIA also remained deeply skeptical about Haq. Even as the agency embraced Karzai, its officers dismissed Haq as someone who could not produce results.

13. Bart Gellman, The Washington Post, January 20, 2002. Time, August 12, 2002, dates the conversation to the first days of spring 2001. Also, interview with a White House official.

14. Gellman, The Washington Post, January 20, 2002, and Time, August 12, 2002, have described the agenda and some of the discussion at this meeting. Armitage and Wolfowitz testified about aspects of the meeting before the Joint Inquiry Committee. Armitage quotations are from his testimony, Federal News Service, September 19, 2002. CIA slides from National Commission final report, p. 203.

15. Testimony of Paul Wolfowitz before the Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002.Wolfowitz defended the deliberate pace of the deputies committee's work by arguing that since the September 11 hijackers had already entered the United States by July, even if the Bush administration had advanced its plans to support Massoud or attack al Qaeda, they probably would not have prevented the New York and Pentagon attacks. Of course, it could be argued equally that a robust disruption of bin Laden's Afghanistan sanctuary might have delayed or altered the course of the attacks. Both sides of the argument rest almost entirely on speculation.

16. Wolfowitz quotation, ibid. State officials' conclusions from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 10.

17. State Department transcript, testimony of Colin Powell before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, May 15, 2001. Late May meeting is from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 7.

18. Testimony of George Tenet, Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. Testimony of Cofer Black, Joint Inquiry Committee, September 26, 2002. "What worries . . . more deadly" from the Committee's final report, Appendix, p. 43. Interviews with U.S. officials. Black's "7 . . . 8" is from National Commission staff statement no. 10, p. 2.

19. Information about NSA intercepts is from Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002. FBI threat reports from the testimony of Michael Rolince, FBI special agent in charge, Washington, D.C., Joint Inquiry Committee, September 24, 2002. State warnings are from the testimony of Richard Armitage, Joint Inquiry Committee, September 19, 2002. FAA warnings are from The New York Times, May 21, 2002.

20. Atiani quotations are from Pamela Constable, The Washington Post, July 8, 2001. The June 26 démarche is from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 120.

21. Bin Laden quotations are from Associated Press, June 19, 2001.

22. "I want a way" from The New York Times, May 17, 2002. Rice, Clarke, and Bush letter from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, p. 16.

23. All quotations are from Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002, except "98 percent certain" and "clear majority view," which are from the Joint Inquiry Committee's final report, p. 8. "Establish contact" is from the final report, p. 29.

24. Ibid.

25. Time, August 12, 2002. National Commission staff statement no. 10, p. 3.

26. Eleanor Hill, Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, September 18, 2002.

27. Ibid., and testimony of George Tenet, Joint Inquiry Committee, October 17, 2002. The Tenet quotations are from his testimony.

28. Testimony of unidentified CIA Counterterrorist Center officer, Joint Inquiry Committee, September 20, 2002. McLaughlin's view and CTC officer's fears from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 8. What Hadley said about Wolfowitz from the final report, p. 259.

29. "Threat . . . to Continue Indefinitely" is from "Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9/11," House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, July 17, 2002. The Tenet quotation is from his Joint Inquiry testimony, October 17, 2002.

30. A copy of this section of the PDB was published by the National Commission. Tenet on delay is from staff statement no. 7, p. 8.

31. Testimony of Cofer Black, Joint Inquiry Committee, September 26, 2002.

32. Tenet's Joint Inquiry testimony, October 17, 2002.

33. Hill, Joint Inquiry statement, September 18, 2002. Also, Joint Inquiry Committee final report, p. 15. National Commission staff statement no. 10, p. 4. Final report, p. 267.

34. Statement of FBI director Robert S. Mueller, Joint Inquiry Committee, September 26, 2002. Backgrounds of the supporting hijackers and Tenet quotation from the Joint Inquiry Committee final report, p. 138.

35. Statement of Robert S. Mueller, Joint Inquiry Committee, September 26, 2002. National Commission staff statement no. 16, based on interrogation statements by Mohammed and Binalshibh, pp. 5-19. Their statements describe debate among al Qaeda leaders about whether it was wise to attack the United States. By Mohammed's account, bin Laden argued that the attack should go forward to support anti-Israel insurgents and to protest American troops in Saudi Arabia.

36. All financial details and flight to Karachi, from Mueller's Joint Inquiry Committee statement, September 26, 2002.

37. Interviews with aides to Massoud and Karzai. "So disappointed" is from an interview with Daoud Yaqub, adviser to Karzai and former executive director of the Afghanistan Foundation, May 27, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).

38. Quotation is from interview with Yaqub, ibid.

39. Abdullah quotations are from Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002.

40. Interview with Yaqub, May 27, 2002, and with several other aides to Karzai and Massoud.

41. Interview with Hamid Karzai, October 21, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (SC).

42. Ibid.

CHAPTER 32: "WHAT AN UNLUCKY COUNTRY"

1. That the Counterterrorist Center knew about the journalists as they crossed Massoud's lines is from interviews with U.S. officials.

2. These details about the assassins, as well as other aspects of the plot described in this chapter, draw on two comprehensive journalistic investigations of Massoud's death: Jon Anderson, The New Yorker, June 10, 2002, and Pyes and Rempel, Los Angeles Times,June 12, 2002. Time, August 12, 2002, also added fresh details to the record through interviews. In addition, this chapter's account is based on interviews in Kabul with seven aides to Massoud, several of them witnesses to the attack, and on interviews with U.S. officials who later debriefed Massoud's aides.

3. The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2001. The draft letter was discovered on a computer hard drive acquired by Journal reporters in Kabul during the autumn of 2001.

4. Anderson, The New Yorker, June 10, 2002, raises the possibility that Sayyaf conspired with al Qaeda to kill Massoud. Witting or unwitting, Sayyaf was a key facilitator in the operation.

5. Interviews with aides to Massoud; Anderson, ibid.; Pyes and Rempel, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002.

6. National Commission final report, pp. 212-213.

7. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 345-46, provide the most detailed account of this meeting available to date. Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, January 20, 2002, also described the agenda, and some participants made partial references to the discussion in Joint Inquiry Committee testimony. Benjamin and Simon raise doubts about the Cabinet's commitment to the covert aid for Massoud and his anti-Taliban allies. "The issue of funding the hundreds of millions of dollars to finance the effort was given to the OMB and CIA to figure out," they write, describing this as "the kind of decision that leaves much undecided, since a government agency that is told to finance a program 'out of hide,' out of the existing budget, frequently argues back that the issue is not a high enough priority."

8. Benjamin and Simon, Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 345-46. The authors say that Tenet "intervened forcefully" during the discussion and said it would be a "terrible mistake . . . for the director of Central Intelligence to fire a weapon like this." That would happen, he reportedly said, "over his dead body." Other officials deny that Tenet was so categorical. They describe him as trying to explain the risks, not argue for a particular outcome. Within weeks after September 11, the CIA did field and operate armed Predators, as did the Air Force, drawing on procedures developed in the summer of 2001. After September 11 the armed Predator was used successfully on the Afghan battlefield and later to shoot and kill a traveling party of accused terrorists in Yemen.

9. Interviews with U.S. officials. The September 4 decision on the Predator is from National Commission staff statement no. 7, p. 7. Hadley formally tasked Tenet to draft a finding for covert aid to Massoud on September 10.

10. Interviews with aides to Massoud; Anderson, The New Yorker, June 10, 2002; Pyes and Rempel, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002. "Is he a wrestler" is from Pyes and Rempel.

11. How the assassination unfolded, from interviews with aides to Massoud; Anderson, The New Yorker, June 10, 2002; Pyes and Rempel, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2002. "He's dying" from Los Angeles Times. The full quotation provided from Omar is "I saw my commander's face and thought to myself, 'He's dying and I'm dying.' "

12. The exchange with Saleh is from interviews with U.S. officials.

13. Interviews with aides to Massoud and with U.S. officials.

14. Ibid.

15. Interviews with three aides and advisers to Massoud then in Washington. September 10 deputies meeting from National Commission, staff statement no. 5, pp. 15-16.

16. Interview with Qayum Karzai, May 19, 2002, Kabul, Afghanistan (GW).