Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker Read Free Book Online Page B

September, Pakistani police raided an apartment in Karachi and captured Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a senior Al Qaeda member, in a gun battle. On November 4, a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA Predator drone in the Yemeni desert killed Qaed Senyan al-Harthi, also known as Abu Ali, one of the planners of the Cole bombing two years earlier. The Yemen strike was the first time an armed Predator drone had been used to attack suspected terrorists outside of Afghanistan. It also signaled a more aggressive phase in the campaign against terrorism, with the United States relying less on the cooperation of other nations to arrest and detain suspected terrorists when they were discovered overseas. But the most important Al Qaeda leader on the Two + Seven list to be seized was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, generally recognized as the third-ranking official in Al Qaeda and one of the principal planners of the East Africa embassy attacks, the Cole bombing, and 9/11 itself. Pakistani forces seized him during a raid on a house in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003.
    As time went on, the seven terrorists initially linked with bin Laden and al-Zawahri on the Two + Seven chart were killed or captured, and new names turned up on President Bush’s scorecard. The initial strategy was chipping away at the enemy’s leadership, but an approach broader than kill-or-capture was clearly needed.
    Another problem remained unresolved: Who would lead that effort? The president, of course, was ultimately in charge of what he called the “war on terror.” But day-to-day, who would take the lead and have the responsibility and authority? “Who was in charge of the war on terror from 9/11 to now?” Myers would later reflect. “I’d say there was probably nobody in charge.” The military was still locked in a kill-or-capture mentality, but elsewhere in the government new thinking on combating terrorists was emerging.
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    In the months after 9/11, the FBI was undergoing a seismic shift in combating terrorism at home and abroad. From the days of J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men, FBI agents had risen through the ranks by arresting bank robbers, kidnappers, and white-collar criminals. But the bureau was transforming fitfully after the 9/11 attacks and now ranked fighting terrorism as its number-one priority. It doubled the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism duties to roughly five thousand and created new squads across the country that focused more on deterring and disrupting terrorism than on solving crimes.
    The FBI was no stranger to domestic terrorism. The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people. And the first World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993, by Ramzi Yousef, the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, killed six people and injured more than a thousand others. But counterterrorism remained a highly specialized backwater at the bureau. On September 11, fewer than one hundred agents had the know-how, field experience, and background running national programs to coordinate a multidistrict, multiagency, international operation like the investigation after 9/11.
    A major lesson from the first World Trade Center bombing was to keep the terrorists off balance and disrupt their plots before they could carry out the next big one. In the initial weeks and months after 9/11, with government experts concerned about a second wave of terrorist strikes, there was a full-court press to anticipate and interdict any follow-up attacks.
    As top FBI counterterrorism officials saw it, if they did not detect a plot unfolding and identify the potential plotters, they needed “to shake the trees hard and make sure that anybody that looks like or smells like or breathes like a terrorist is not given the opportunity to execute on an operation that we don’t see.” That strategy came at a cost. By 2003, some counterterrorism experts within the FBI began challenging whether disruption