Takedown: Inside the Hunt for Al Qaeda

6 The Years of Threat

C h a p T e r 6 the years of threat There waS so much threat reporting, often from credible sources, and so many spikes in activity, over the course of years, that the threats run together. Those years are a jumble, running from one threat to another while we tried to understand the progress in the war more broadly and stand up an office that had the bureaucratic support to provide careers and a life for all the analysts who had flooded to work the terrorism problem. even years later, though, there were a few tense periods that stand out because of threats, and the intense attention they brought to the persistent al Qaeda threat. One of the most chilling resulted from the arrest of Dhiren Bharot, an al Qaeda operative in Britain who had traveled to the United States before 9/11. Bharot also had, after 9/11, traveled to the tribal areas of Pakistan, along the border with afghanistan, presumably at least in part to report on what he knew of the United States, and to participate in planning or undertaking operations in the UK or elsewhere. what we found on Bharot’s computer were files that reaffirmed, once again, the commitment of al Qaeda to strike a blow against a strategic U.S. target, in this case new York, new Jersey, or sites in washington. as the information began rolling in, we understood quickly that the casing reports Bharot had amassed during his time in the United States could have been the feed material for an al Qaeda operation. Furthermore, it wasn’t just the 136 CHAPTER 6 specificity of the targets he was looking at: it was the meticulous care with which he had studied the targets. he was methodical. The washington threat machinery kicked into high gear immediately, as we disseminated information from the casing packages into intelligence reports sent throughout washington and analysts and policymakers throughout the city realized the import of what Dhiren Bharot had done. what happened afterward is now a jumble to me, but elements of it were classic as examples of how serious threat information affects washington and the country as a whole. we had to explain to policy consumers in washington what we had, the import of the Bharot information, and we had to do it fast. In a city of leaks, nobody who has responsibility for responding to threat information, or for explaining it to the american people, wants to hear about a major threat from the news media. we didn’t want it either, both because rapid dissemination of critical intelligence is a hallmark of a good intelligence organization and because disinformation about threats like the Bharot casing rapidly fills the void if consumers don’t receive the real thing very quickly. Moreover, because there was a substantial quantity of information that would take us some time to exploit, we had to ensure that we maintained this pace, and kept people informed, during the entire period when teams of analysts were reviewing his material. It was a lot. and it was important. and, finally, it was urgent. I remember early one morning looking through the electronic messages detailing the overnight processing of some of the Bharot information and realizing that the information was so critical to understanding the case that the CIa executive going in to see the president should know before the briefing . at that point, the information was rolling in so fast that material a day old might already be stale, circulating around washington in almost real time, so we could mitigate any imminent threat, before the formal dissemination of the material followed. no one would want to walk out of the Oval Office only to find, a half-hour later, that the briefing should have been updated. especially given that the President himself no doubt would learn of the updates later in the day. The material itself was dated by the time Bharot was captured—he had actually surveilled the potential targets in the United States before 9/11—but he had more recent contacts with al Qaeda players. and, as is most often the case with these rapidly evolving threat streams, we didn’t know what we THE YEARS OF THREAT 137 didn’t know. It would be easy on the outside to say that we reacted too sharply to dated information, dusty surveillance files. with this and similar cases, though, life on the inside seemed different, sometimes fundamentally so, from...