The One Percent Doctrine

Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11

Ron Suskind

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781416527602
• eBook ISBN: 9781847396167
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In his devastating new book Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind takes readers inside the defining conflict of our era: the war between the West and a growing, shadowy army of terrorists, armed with weapons of alarming power. Relying on unique access to former and current government officials, this book will reveal for the first time how the US government -- from President Bush on down -- is frantically improvising to fight a new kind of war. Where is the enemy? What have been the real victories and defeats since 9/11? How are we actually fighting this war and how can it possibly be won? Filled with astonishing disclosures, Suskind's book shows readers what he calls "the invisible battlefield" -- a global matrix where US spies race to catch soldiers of jihad before they strike. It is a real-life spy thriller with the world's future at stake. It also reveals the shocking and secret philosophy underpinning the war on terror. Gripping and alarming in equal measure, it will reframe the debate about a war that, each day, redefines America and its place in the world.

CHAPTER ONE FALSE POSITIVES

At noon on September 13, a passing agent ducked his head into Dennis Lormel’s office. He said that someone had called from the Omaha FBI office. A company named First Data Corporation, with a huge processing facility out there, wanted to help in any way it could. A red-eyed Lormel looked up from his desk. “Oh, that’s big,” he said, breaking into a weary smile. “That could be very, very big.”

The son of a New York City cop, Lormel had spent two decades working the financial angle of some of the bureau’s biggest cases, from corrupt congressmen in the Abscam scandal, to allegations of Billy Carter being bribed by Libyans, to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, the mother of all international bank frauds.

First Data is one of the world’s largest processors of credit card transactions, a company with $6.5 billion in revenues and a global reach. Lormel knew there would be scores of names to check, starting with the nineteen hijackers, and that each name would produce several hits—false positives—that would then have to be checked against the place and time specifics of spending histories. There would be civil liberties issues—legally, each credit card search demanded a warrant. There might not be time for that; another attack might be on the way.

But Lormel also knew something most of the agents running sleepless around FBI headquarters two days after 9/11 didn’t know: First Data was not only the world’s leading credit card processor—an extraordinary ally at this moment. “Inside that company,” he told the young agent, “is a gem.”

Western Union.

The old telegraph company was the engine of a technological revolution many generations removed from the present. Its heyday was in the 1850s, when it began stringing wire cables across the Northeast, then the first transcontinental cable in 1861. Five years later, those cables carried trading on the New York Stock Exchange to cities up and down the East Coast on “tickers.” It was hailed as a miracle.

The world moved on. But many of the twenty-two nations in the Arab world still have a foot planted in this past. Western Union, with nearly $2.7 billion in revenue, remains a destination for a wide slice of the Arab world’s 300 million residents. In some less favored parts of the globe, the only way to wire funds is the old-fashioned way. You bring your money to the Western Union office. You hand it over. They count it. And soon, transmission is made to another of the company’s offices, a hot flash of cold cash.

The so-called “war on terror” is about unlikely twists, strange alliances, about things you least expect. The unexpected is, in fact, what catches a swiftly adaptable enemy—namely, a global village of Islamic terrorists—by surprise. Lormel is a financial crimes wizard, who talks like a longshoreman, knows how to play rough, and has a fine-tuned capacity to think like his prey—a perfect character for a moment that demands innovation. The previous night, he’d arrived home for dinner after wandering in a daydream through a frantic FBI headquarters for much of the day. He told his wife, Molly, “I figured a lot of stuff out… we need a massive integrated approach to this—the whole government working together—and we can wrap them up, all of them, the bastards. There’s a lot we can do now on the financial side that we could never do before. If, for once, we can just get everyone organized.”

Now, sitting in his office, Lormel told the young agent to go get him a number for First Data, and he chewed over an idea: “We need to turn this company into a deadly weapon.”

---

On the seventh floor of CIA headquarters, at midnight on September 13, George Tenet, an exhausted forty-eight, slumped into his office. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours since the attacks, and it was starting to show. Jami Miscik, Tenet’s deputy associate director of intelligence, stuck her head in the doorway.

“Ready to crash?”

“Maybe soon,” he said. “But not for long.”

Miscik, a slender brunette in her fifties, had affection for Tenet, who’d made her his executive assistant back when he was the deputy director in 1996, and, as director, promoted her to the number two job in the Directorate of Intelligence, or DI—home of CIA’s army of analysts. They’d been through a lot together. Nothing, though, like what was to come.

She loves George. They all seem to on the seventh floor at CIA, a rarity in a place where the walls are primed with secrecy and the distrust it breeds. Among recent DCIs (Directors of Central Intelligence) he’s an anomaly, with a kind of clumsy, shirt-untucked openness, and a behavioral tic whereby he has trouble criticizing anyone, even when they deserve it. Most of the trouble he gets into is because he aims to please, even when he’s screaming at you.

She eased in and sat on the arm of a cushioned chair across from his desk, a conditional posture, so she could slip out if he was too tired, or if a call came from somebody more important, anxious to talk. The upper reaches of government were—at this moment—jammed with anxious somebodies.

Miscik, who joined the agency in 1983 as an economic analyst, now watched over thousands of analysts who read the human intelligence, or humint, collected by field agents, clandestine agents, and foreign sources of human intelligence, and the signals intelligence, or sigint, from the vast U.S. network of eavesdropping. Their goal is to make sense of it in so-called “operational time”—which translates into when needed, or, in the current parlance, in time to save lives. On that, they had failed. Things had been missed. Miscik knew that. It didn’t matter that her task—or theirs, at the DI—was a task that flirted with abstract limits: knowing everything you need to know, when you need to know it.

“We need to figure out new ways that we can take this story apart and put it back together again,” she said. “See what else might there be… what we may be missing.”

Tenet grabbed his pad. “All right,” he said. “Where do we start?”

“With a few of the most creative people we can find to head up a unit of people who’ve never worked on terrorism,” she said. “See what they see as they look at what we’re facing, see if they see anything different.”

“Fresh eyes,” Tenet said, rubbing his own. “We could use some of those.” They discussed names, until Miscik slipped out, saying she’d have a list compiled by morning.

Tenet turned toward the window, and leaned back in his chair. Just above the line of trees that obscures the CIA campus, the lights of Washington—an altered city, reconstructing its worldview—were barely visible in the distance. An endless day was now ending. Not that it hadn’t gone well. It had, better than he could have hoped. That morning, one of Tenet’s key deputies—the tough, theatrical Cofer Black, head of the agency’s Counter-Terrorist Center—had given an astonishing performance in the White House Situation Room. After nine months of daily presidential briefings, Tenet knew Black would be the right man to stir George W. Bush’s blood. And he was. The President was getting his bearings. Now that it was clear who was behind the attacks, he was anxious to think clearly about the U.S. response. Pacing the floor in the Situation Room, under the quizzical gazes of National Security Council (NSC) principals and an anxious President, Black had laid out a plan that Tenet and other senior agency officials had swiftly constructed: a campaign led by CIA, supported by U.S. Special Forces, that would soon invade Afghanistan, employ local tribal leaders and hard-bitten fighters, and decapitate al Qaeda in its Afghan refuge. There would be a cost, Black said—U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives would die—but the enemy would “have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

The President—in full action mode—nodded, alert and hard-eyed. Later, he’d call this a “turning point in my thinking,” the framing of a plan to invade Afghanistan. In the afternoon, at another NSC meeting, Bush had given a preliminary nod as well to ideas Tenet had for granting the CIA added powers. Powers, as Tenet told him, “to take off the shackles” and really go after the enemy. To rise to this occasion, the agency would need more money, more trained bodies, more latitude. They’d need a global strategy. Bush agreed. Already, just two days after the attacks, he wanted more—more details, more ideas, more of everything.

All of which made George Tenet fairly sure he wouldn’t be fired.

It was thoroughly logical to have wondered, of course. Presidents, all leaders, need someone to blame at moments like this. When a country is caught by surprise, the person designated with knowing enough to prevent surprises—a vizier, an archduke, a particular general, an intelligence chief—will generally take the fall.

“Of course, you knew we all could be fired,” said John McLaughlin, Tenet’s deputy, looking back. “No one had a whole lot of time to think about that. It was mostly, ‘Go, go, go. We know what to do. Let’s pull a plan together. If someone wants to fire us, fine! We’ll just give him a plan on our way out the door.’ ”

To understand what would occur over the coming four years, it is crucial to understand this mix of insecurity and gratitude—this survivor’s guilt, survivor’s surprise, survivor’s appreciation—and how it played out, especially in terms of George Tenet.

It is the key to a central relationship in the “war on terror”—the dance between the two Georges. They were a natural pair from the start—gregarious men, blunt, physical, cut-the-crap types—but from very different worlds. Tenet, the son of working-class Greek immigrants, a New Yorker, was a self-made man, a Democrat, who’d come up through Congress—as a staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee, then over to the NSC, then to CIA’s number two position in the mid-nineties, having impressed Clinton—and always felt he needed to prove himself, to earn his way. Bush, on almost all those points, hailed from a smug loyal opposition, having stamped advantages of birth with his own mark and risen to the nation’s highest perch, matching his father. When Tenet was kept on after the 2000 election, there were whispers of surprise from within the White House. The old man had a role, knowledgeable insiders said, telling his son that Tenet was a good man and that CIA should remain beyond politics, a point made by keeping Tenet aboard. In theory, fine, but let’s see how it works out, they said. See how he fits with Bush and Cheney. Tenet heard them, and each day—at each official ceremony and early-morning briefing—he sought to prove his worth. Every top official serves “at the pleasure of the President.” For Tenet, an outsider in the inner circle, the phrase was served, cold, at each day’s breakfast.

And that was all before the tragic events. Had Bush fired the CIA director in the wake of 9/11, Tenet would have been cast into an abyss of almost unfathomable censure, the kind that crushes lives. The unseen attack matched with someone to blame. Judgment. Eternal vilification.

When Republican congressmen attacked Tenet in the days after 9/11, Bush swiftly came to his aid. “We cannot be second-guessing our team,” the President told a group of angry congressmen aboard Air Force One on September 27, “and I’m not going to. The nation’s at war. We need to encourage Congress to frankly leave the man alone. Tenet’s doing a good job. And if he’s not, blame me, not him.”

At that point, George Tenet would do anything his President asked. Anything. And George W. Bush knew it.

---

On Friday, September 14, when the President of the United States wanted a grant of special powers from Congress, his team arrived on Capitol Hill well prepared.

It so happened that administration lawyers had for months been incubating theories about how to expand presidential power. The ideas were originally seeded by the Vice President, a believer, since his harrowing days in the death throes of the Nixon administration, that executive power had been dangerously diminished.

In both the House and Senate, White House negotiators pressed for the broadest possible legislative language, including authorization to engage in wide-ranging activities on U.S. territory.

The language of the proposed resolution authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” A sweeping mandate. Minutes before the vote, the White House officials had pressed for even more—after “use all necessary and appropriate force,” they wanted to insert “in the United States,” to, essentially, grant war powers to anything a president deigned to do within the United States. Senators shot that down. That would be without precedent. A resolution passed in the Senate by a vote of 98 to 0 and in the House by a vote of 420 to 1.

Two days later, on Sunday morning, September 16, Vice President Dick Cheney settled into a secure cabin overlooking Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains, to explain how the President would use this extraordinary grant. Cheney, with more executive branch experience than any vice president in modern times, knew this was his moment. The President had spoken briefly in televised addresses, and then on Friday afternoon from the rubble of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn. Now, it was Cheney’s turn to speak about execution, how to get the job done, his métier. The lights came up, and it was clear that Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press would ask few questions today. Viewers wanted to hear the Vice President speak. In a moment, Cheney settled into his stentorian rhythm, the grumbling, got-this-covered, call-you-if-I-need-you thrump of crew-cut speech. In fighting al Qaeda, he said, the government needed to “work through, sort of, the dark side.” Crises prompt candor. The country was in trauma. Cheney was, against his nature, opening the playbook on national television. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in. And so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Experts on Osama bin Laden often advise, “Listen to what he says. It’s all there. He says what he means.” In this one case, that was also true of the Vice President. So much is in that one statement, so much more, in its way, than the bold, blood-quickening calls to bring “infinite justice” to our enemies abroad—and, yes, maybe hiding among us—evildoers who would soon taste the fury of might sharpened by right. Not that those calls to arms weren’t effective. They were; just maybe not suited for the challenge America now faced. The real action, Cheney said, would not happen with armies assembled and banners waving. It would happen in the shadows.

---

At a special cabinet meeting on Monday morning, September 17, the President handed out assignments. After a weekend of deliberation with his top officials at Camp David, it was time for action. The mission was to oust al Qaeda from its Afghanistan refuge and, if necessary, destroy the country’s ruling Taliban regime. The response, in this case, would bridge old and new, engaging intelligence officers, air-power, and a light military footprint. “The CIA is in first,” Bush told the seventeen top officials of the U.S. government gathered around the cabinet table that morning, each of whom—the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Energy, Defense, Justice—would leave with a task list. The CIA teams would immediately begin by engaging with the Afghan tribes—supporting, directing, bribing—and prepare the terrain for the arrival of U.S. Special Forces. Targeted bombings would most likely commence soon, it was hoped by early October. A limited number of U.S. troops—a few thousand—would then arrive, guided by a map largely drawn by CIA agents who had experience in the region and, now, the full faith of the President.

Washington, day by day, had already become the bustling capital of a twilight struggle—the so-called “war on terror,” a term that was settling unevenly into the global vernacular. Close facsimiles had been floated for a week or so after the attacks and before President Bush used it, just so, in his landmark speech of September 20, 2001, declaring before a joint session of Congress that “Our ‘war on terror’ begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach had been found, stopped and defeated.”

The term’s meaning drifted fitfully, being defined mostly by what it was not—a kind of definition by default. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer parried with reporters at a press conference on the key issue: use of the word “war.”

“You don’t declare war against an individual, surely?” puzzled one.

“How can you declare war against a nation when you don’t know the nation involved?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t know whether we should use the word ‘war,’ ” French president Jacques Chirac said, standing next to George W. Bush at a press conference shortly after 9/11, when the two countries stood united. “But what I can say is that now we are faced with a conflict of a completely new nature.”

Several immediate responses would, indeed, be of a “new nature.” One, that the CIA—an intelligence agency—would be the central actor, a kind of loosely assembled army, with many tasks. Too many. Though the agency had failed in its prime mission—specific advance warning of the 9/11 attacks—more than any other arm of the U.S. government it was ready for the aftermath. While other parts of the government looked at what institutional capabilities they might now employ to protect and defend America, CIA was already several years into “the plan,” a strategic analysis of how to fight al Qaeda that the agency had started in 1999—a full year after Tenet said to his staff that “we’d spare no expense in funds or bodies” in fighting this threat from transnational terrorist groups.

Strong words. But, as months slipped into years, not much to show for the bluster. While, surely, funds had been tight, and proposed budget increases had been turned down by both Clinton and Bush, only a modest share of overall CIA resources had been put toward the counterterrorism effort. There were too many weaknesses in too many areas at the agency, which had lost nearly a quarter of its budget in the 1990s as part of the “peace dividend.” The clandestine service had been gutted. Humint assets in the Arab world were almost nonexistent. Tenet’s strategy to counter the growing terrorist threat had been to rebuild the entire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Chapter One: False Positives
• Chapter Two: Beyond Suspicion
• Chapter Three: Necessity’s Offspring
• Chapter Four: Zawahiri’s Head
• Chapter Five: Going Operational
• Chapter Six: Cause for Alarm
• Chapter Seven: Conversations with Dictators
• Chapter Eight: Wages of Fear
• Chapter Nine: Hearts and Minds
• Afterword
• Afterword to the Paperback Edition
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Copyright