The Path to 9/11 | Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411 Sign In Subscribe The Price of Failure THE PATH TO 9/11: LOST WARNINGS AND FATAL ERRORS By the time the hijackers made their way into the U.S., memos, photographs, and intercepts had sounded alarms inside the C.I.A., White House, F.B.I., and European intelligence services. Could better cooperation have stopped the attacks? Ned Zeman, David Wise, David Rose, and Bryan Burrough show how the hideous “Planes Operation” took shape as the C.I.A.’s bin Laden point man, Mike Scheuer, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, the F.B.I.’s John MacGaffin, and others fought—yet couldn’t work together—to prevent it. BY NED ZEMAN, DAVID WISE, DAVID ROSE, AND BRYAN BURROUGH ! " # DECEMBER 19, 2008 12:00 AM ith his salt-and-pepper hair, white shirt, and sensible shoes, Mike Scheuer, 44, looked like a rumpled academician, or maybe a consultant for one of the many defense contractors [#image: /photos/54cbf62044a199085e88c698]sprinkled around the W Washington Beltway. In reality, his job was considerably more interesting. Starting in 1996, he was the man the C.I.A. had assigned to hunt down, capture, or kill Osama bin Laden. Of all the agency’s far-flung stations—from Moscow to Prague to Beijing—Scheuer’s was unique. Known among the spooks as a “virtual station,” it was not overseas but near the C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, eight miles west of Washington. 3 ARTICLES LEFT Subscribe Sign In 1 of 53 11/11/18, 17:18 The Path to 9/11 | Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411 The station was the first to target an individual rather than a country. This was not because bin Laden was perceived at the time to be the arch-enemy and mastermind of global terrorism that he is today. Back then, those few in government who even knew his name referred to him merely as “a terrorist financier.” Try Vanity Fair and receive a free tote. Join Now Still, “we had run across bin Laden in a lot of different places,” recalls Scheuer, “not personally but in terms of his influence, either through rhetoric, through audiotapes, through passports, through money—he seemed to turn up everywhere. So when we chose him [for the first virtual station], the first responsibility was to find out if he was a threat.” Watch Now: From ‘Frankenstein’ to ‘Get Out,’ How Horror Films Evolved Over Time 0:04/8:16 Although officially called Bin Laden Issue Station, everyone who worked there called it “Alec Station,” after Scheuer’s son. Many at the agency questioned the efficacy of a C.I.A. Middle East station based in suburban Virginia. Not to mention that Alec 3 ARTICLES LEFT Subscribe Sign In 2 of 53 11/11/18, 17:18 The Path to 9/11 | Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411 were an up-and-coming C.I.A. officer,” says former C.I.A. case officer Robert Baer, “you didn’t want to get sent down there to sit around with those F.B.I. guys.” Alec Station was so low-profile it was housed “off campus,” in nearby Tysons Corner, behind an unmarked door in a nondescript office building filled with defense contractors. (Eventually, it was moved to the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, in Langley.) There, every morning, Scheuer and his staff of 15 or so—mostly junior- grade, mostly female—toiled in their cubicles. They soon discovered that bin Laden “was much more of a threat than I had thought,” recalls Scheuer. “It became very clear very early that he was after, for example, W.M.D., and we showed conclusively at that point that he didn’t have them. But we had never seen as professional an organization in charge of procurement.” By 1998, Scheuer and his staff had become so passionate about going after bin Laden that he felt his superiors weren’t getting it. Scheuer later informed Congress that when Alec Station had obtained detailed intelligence in 1996 about attempts by bin Laden to acquire nuclear weapons, the higher-ups decided to suppress the information. Only after three officers “of the agency’s bin Laden cadre” complained and forced an internal review was the information released more fully to analysts, policymakers, and community leaders. A bunker mentality set in at Alec Station. Them against us. Up on Langley’s seventh floor, in the executive suites, the top brass started to view Scheuer as a hysteric, spinning doomsday scenarios, a sort of Kurtz-like figure. “The Manson family,” some started calling him and his staff. “The overwhelming majority of officers who worked for me were women,” Scheuer recalls. “And they don’t care for that. They don’t care for women, period, but they especially don’t care for successful women.” Yet even some of Scheuer’s supporters admit that he had become difficult. “He’s a good guy, [but] he’s an angry guy,” says John MacGaffin, a former top C.I.A. official for clandestine operations and later a senior adviser to the F.B.I. trangely, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar, and Scheuer did not get along. “Strangely” because they were among the few 3 ARTICLES LEFT Subscribe Sign In 3 of 53 S 11/11/18, 17:18 The Path to 9/11 | Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411 Scheuer and Clarke were, in many ways, doppelgängers: brainy, workaholic, cranky, impolitic, stubborn. Like Scheuer, Clarke had an intensely loyal staff, and he often ruffled feathers with his abrasiveness and impatience. A former C.I.A. insider says, “I can say that, among individuals that I tend to trust, Clarke was regarded as more serious about terrorism in the 1990s than just about anybody else in the U.S. government, but he was a truly painful individual to work with.” That’s exactly how Clarke views Scheuer. “Throwing tantrums and everything doesn’t help,” says Clarke. “Fine that you came to the same conclusion that we all came to, fine that you’re all worked up about it, and you’re having difficulty getting your agency, the rest of your agency, to fall in line, but not fine that you’re so dysfunctional within your agency that you’re making it harder to get something done.” For his part, Scheuer recalls that “Mr. Clarke was an interferer of the first level, in terms of talking about things that he knew nothing about and killing them.” He adds, “Mr. Clarke was an empire builder. He built the community, and it was his little toy. He was always playing the F.B.I. off against us or us against the N.S.A. [National Security Agency].” Such a relationship did not bode well for early efforts to target bin Laden. But there was worse: Scheuer and the F.B.I. agents assigned to his office didn’t get along, either. From the start, key F.B.I. officials resisted the idea of cooperating with Alec Station. Chief among them was the F.B.I.’s top counterterrorism guy, a swaggering, old-school G-man named John O’Neill (who died on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, where he had just begun a new job as chief of security). “O’Neill just fought it and fought it [cooperating with Alec Station],” MacGaffin recalls, and O’Neill and Scheuer “were at each other’s throats.” Very early on O’Neill refused to hand over to the C.I.A. a notebook taken from an al- Qaeda operative captured by the F.B.I. According to MacGaffin, O’Neill said, “Fuck you. I’ve got it. I’m keeping it. It’s mine. This is the F.B.I.’s.” Technically, the notebook was evidence in a court case, but MacGaffin, who was by this time at the F.B.I., recalls that “O’Neill said to me personally, ‘I just don’t want them to have it. I want the F.B.I. 3 ARTICLES LEFT Subscribe Sign In 4 of 53 11/11/18, 17:18 The Path to 9/11 | Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/11/path-to-9-11-200411 that all the C.I.A.’s years of analytic experience and information in databases on these very terrorist organizations were not brought to bear on that book for a very long time.” On another occasion an F.B.I. agent at Alec Station was caught stuffing C.I.A. files down his shirt to take back up to O’Neill in New York. “So here Scheuer’s getting angry, knows he’s being had,” recalls MacGaffin. According to Scheuer, the F.B.I. did little to follow up on the intelligence from Alec Station. In his 2004 book, Imperial Hubris, which the C.I.A. required him to publish anonymously, Scheuer wrote, “The FBI officers I worked with—some of whom I managed—were ordered by their superiors to stay side-by-side with my agency.… Only one of these FBI officers … did his best to run down U.S.-based al Qaeda leads provided by my service.” Nor, Scheuer says, did the F.B.I. offer much help. In his interview with V.F., he adds, “I bet we sent 700 or 800 requests for information to the F.B.I., and we never got an answer to any of them.” ould the 9/11 attacks have been prevented if the people in charge of protecting us had cooperated better? Even at 567 densely worded, sometimes electrifying pages, the published report of the 9/11 commission studiously avoids answering that question.