User:Frank Freeman

Frank Freeman became an active Wikipedia editor on October 11, 2006.

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Beginnings of al-Qaeda

In the 1980s the CIA covertly supported the Afghan guerrilla struggle against the Soviets, in an operation known as "Operation Cyclone".

By the mid-1980s many Arabs were volunteering to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Office of Services was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984 by Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden to finance and support this effort. "Cold warriors" in the CIA and US State Department looked favorably on these efforts, and considered that they should be formally endorsed and expanded, perhaps along the lines of the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War. "Bin Laden actually did some very good things", said Milton Bearden, chief of the CIA's Islamabad station in the later 1980s. "He put a lot of money in a lot of right places in Afghanistan. He never came on the screen of any Americans as either a terrific asset or someone who was anti-American." The CIA denied, however, actually assisting the "Arab Afghans" (as the Arab volunteers became known), or having direct contact with Bin Laden.

But J. Michael Springmann, head of the non-immigrant visa section at the "CIA-dominated" US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1987-88, said he learned that the CIA had a "program to bring people to the United States for terrorist training, people recruited by the CIA and its asset Usama bin Laden, and the idea was to get them trained and send them back to Afghanistan to fight the then Soviets." "Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese." These "recruits without backgrounds" were given visas over Springmann's protests.

On American soil, the CIA used Muslim charities and mosque communities as fronts for recruitment of fighters in their secret war against the USSR in the Hindu Kush [sic]. As Cooley writes in Unholy Wars: "One was in New York's Arab district, in Broooklyn along Atlantic Avenue ... Another was a private rifle club in an affluent community of Connecticut."

Bin Laden and a man named Mustafa Chalaby, who ran a jihad refugee centre in Brooklyn, were both protégés of Abdullah Azzam. ...

[T]hose directly recruited by the US ... went to Camp Peary — "the Farm", as the CIA's spy training centre in Virginia is known in the intelligence community ... At the Farm and other secret camps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned strategic sabotage skills.

Beginning in 1986, the Office of Services had begun opening branches in the USA under the name of al-Khifah. The largest branch was in Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, New York. Others were at Tucson, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. The Brooklyn center worked to provide training and raise funds for the Afghan war effort. It was "a place of pivotal importance to Operation Cyclone". Al-Khifah had a training camp (perhaps the "private rifle club") in Connecticut where "Recruits received brief paramilitary training and weapons induction, according to evidence in [subsequent terrorist] trials". Several former members of the "active service" of the CIA were employed there as "expert consultants".

In about 1988 Azzam and Bin Laden supposedly founded "al-Qaeda" in Afghanistan. The organization was derived from the Office of Services, but it was not large in the late 1980s. Jamal al-Fadl (himself recruited through the Brooklyn center in the mid 1980s) was described as the "third member". (Al-Fadl later "defected" to the CIA and provided the agency's Bin Laden unit with a great deal of evidence about al-Qaeda. See next.)

Another significant figure was Ali Mohamed "al-Amriki" (the American). Originally an Egyptian army captain, in the 1980s Mohamed came to the US and became a supply sergeant to the Green Berets in Fort Bragg. At the same time he was involved with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which "merged" with al-Qaeda in the 1990s), and later with Qaeda itself. Mohamed boasted of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. He had worked for the CIA in the earlier 1980s, but the agency supposedly dropped him after he boasted of his relationship. But Mohamed's behavior led his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Robert Anderson, to believe he was still a US intelligence asset. ("I assumed the CIA", said Anderson.) In 1989 Mohamed trained anti-Soviet fighters in his spare time, apparently at the al-Khifah center in Brooklyn. He was "honorably discharged" from the US military in November 1989. In the early 1990s Mohamed returned to Afghanistan, where he gave training in Qaeda camps. According to FBI special agent Jack Cloonan, in one of Mohamed's first classes were Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Qaeda leaders. (It is not clear what period Cloonan is referring to in his article.)

The Bin Laden Issue Station

Main article: Bin Laden Issue Station

In 1996 an experimental "virtual station" was launched, modeled on the agency's geographically-based stations, but based in Washington and dedicated to a particular (transnational) issue. It was placed under the Counterterrorist Center (CTC), and (like the Center itself) cut across disciplines and drew its personnel from widely across the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Michael Scheuer, who up to then headed the Center's Islamic extremist branch, was asked to run it. Scheuer, who had noticed a stream of intelligence reports about Osama bin Laden, suggested the station be dedicated to this particular individual. The station began to produce evidence that Bin Laden was not only a significant terrorist financier, but a terrorist organizer too, and sought weapons of mass destruction. Originally dubbed "Terrorist Financial Links" (TFL), the unit soon became rechristened the Bin Laden Issue Station.

The US government did not yet share the Bin Laden unit's consciousness of a structured worldwide organization called al-Qaeda, referring rather to bin Laden and his "associates" or "network". And a 1997 CIA National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism only briefly mentioned bin Laden. The intelligence community did not in fact describe al-Qaeda until 1999.

Al Qaeda operated as an organization in more than sixty countries, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center calculated by late 1999 [a figure that was to help underpin the "War On Terror" two years later]. Its formal, sworn, hard-core membership might number in the hundreds. Thousands more joined allied militias such as the [Afghan] Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. ...

The Plan

In 1999 DCI George Tenet launched a grand "Plan" to deal with al-Qaeda. In preparation, he selected new leadership for the Counterterrorist Center. He placed Cofer Black in charge of the CTC, and "Rich B" (a "top-flight executive" from Tenet's own leadership group) in charge of the CTC's Bin Laden unit. Tenet assigned the CTC to develop the Plan. The proposals, brought out in September, sought to penetrate Qaeda's "Afghan sanctuary" with US and Afghan agents, in order to obtain information on and mount operations against Bin Laden's network. In October, officers from the Bin Laden unit visited northern Afghanistan. Once the Plan was finalized, the Agency created a "Qaeda cell" (whose functions overlapped those of the CTC's Bin Laden unit) to give operational leadership to the effort.

The CIA concentrated its inadequate financial resources on the Plan, so that at least some of its more modest aspirations were realized. Intelligence collection efforts on bin Laden and al-Qaeda increased significantly from 1999. "By 9/11", said Tenet, "a map would show that these collection programs and human [reporting] networks were in place in such numbers as to nearly cover Afghanistan". (But this excluded Bin Laden's inner circle itself.)

The Predator drone

The CIA also experimented with a small remote-controlled reconnaissance aircraft, the Predator, to try to spot Bin Laden in Afghanistan. A series of flights in autumn 2000, overseen by CTC officials and flown by USAF drone pilots from a control room at the CIA's Langley headquarters, produced probable sightings of the Qaeda leader.

Black and others became advocates of arming the Predator with adapted Hellfire anti-tank missiles to try to assassinate Bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders. But there were both legal and technical issues. Tenet in particular was concerned about the CIA moving back into the business of assassination. And a series of live-fire tests in the Nevada Desert in summer 2001 produced mixed results.

Tenet advised cautiously on the matter at a meeting of the Cabinet-level Principals Committee on September 4, 2001. If the Cabinet wanted to empower the CIA to field a lethal drone, Tenet said, "they should do so with their eyes wide open, fully aware of the potential fallout if there were a controversial or mistaken strike". National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice concluded that the armed Predator was required, but evidently not ready. It was agreed to recommend to the CIA to resume reconnaissance flights. The "previously reluctant" Tenet then ordered the Agency to do so. The CIA was authorized to "deploy the system" with weapons-capable drones.

The strategic assessments branch

In late 2000 Tenet, recognizing the deficiency of "big-picture" analysis of al-Qaeda, appointed a senior manager in the Counterterrorist Center to investigate "creating a strategic assessment capability". In spring 2001 the CTC got back to him, requesting the hiring of "a small group of contractors not involved in day-to-day crises to digest vast quantities of information and develop targeting strategies".

The CTC's Strategic Assessments Branch was formally set up in July. But it struggled to find personnel. The head of the branch finally took up his post on September 10, 2001.

Worldwide Attack Matrix

Tenet considered that his Qaeda plan had placed the CIA in a better position to respond after the 9/11 attacks. As he put it,

How could [an intelligence] community without a strategic plan tell the president of the United States just four days after 9/11 how to attack the Afghan sanctuary and operate against al-Qa'ida in ninety-two countries around the world?

This was at a meeting of the restricted National Security Council -- or "war council" -- at Camp David on September 15, 2001. Tenet presented the Worldwide Attack Matrix, a blueprint for what became known as the War On Terror. He proposed firstly to send CIA teams into Afghanistan to collect intelligence on, and mount covert operations against, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The teams would act jointly with military Special Operations units. "President Bush later praised this proposal, saying it had been a turning point in his thinking."

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