The Hunt for Bin Laden by Tom Shroder

Author:Tom Shroder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Washington Post
Published: 2011-06-26T21:00:00+00:00

Covert War in Jeopardy

As the Bush administration took office early in 2001, Massoud retained a Washington lobbyist. He wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney urging the new administration to reexamine U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. He told his advisers that he knew he could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield as long as the ruling militia was funded by bin Laden and reinforced from Pakistan. He sought to build up a new political and military coalition within Afghanistan to squeeze the Taliban and break its grip on ordinary Afghans. For this, sooner or later, he told visitors, he would require the support of the United States.

His CIA liaison had slackened, but his intelligence aides still spoke and exchanged messages frequently with Langley. That spring, they passed word that Massoud had been invited to France to address the European Parliament.

Schroen, the CIA officer from Islamabad, and Rich flew to Paris to meet with Massoud. They wanted to reassure him that even though the pace of their visits had slowed because of the policy gridlock in Washington, the CIA still intended to keep up its regular installment payments of several hundred thousand dollars as part of their intelligence-sharing arrangements. They also wanted to know how Massoud felt about his military position.

Massoud told them that he thought he could defend his lines in the northeast of Afghanistan but that was about all. The United States had to do something, Massoud told the CIA officers quietly, or eventually he was going to crumble.

“If President Bush doesn’t help us,” Massoud told reporters in Strasbourg a few days later, “then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon — and it will be too late.”

Early in September 2001, Massoud’s intelligence service transmitted a routine classified report to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center about two Arab television journalists who had crossed Northern Alliance lines from Kabul.

The intelligence-sharing between Massoud and the CIA concentrated mainly on Arabs and foreigners in Afghanistan. In this case, officers in the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center took note of the movement of the two journalists. It did not seem of exceptional interest.

Members of the Bush’s Cabinet met Sept. 4 at the White House. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al-Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud.

It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration’s senior national security team had not begun to focus on al-Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took additional weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.

Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck Clinton White House — and rejected — nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a

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