From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com REVIEWED BY BOB KERREY Before Sept. 11, 2001, the National Security Agency bent over backwards to assure Americans that it respected their privacy. The supersecret intelligence agency's then-director, Gen. Michael Hayden, told Congress in April 2000 that if, at that very moment, Osama bin Laden himself were walking across the Peace Bridge from Niagara Falls, Canada, as soon as he reached the New York side "my agency must respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure." In The Shadow Factory, James Bamford's important and disturbing new book about the NSA, we learn that as the general spoke, two of bin Laden's men already had arrived on American soil and were taking flying lessons. We also learn that, contrary to the implication of Hayden's testimony, the NSA was intercepting their communications. A few months earlier the huge agency, based at Fort Meade, Md., 27 miles outside of Washington, had begun surveillance of a bin Laden operations center in Sana'a, Yemen. This was not just another intercept: Bin Laden had declared war on the United States, his organization had bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the NSA had good reason to suspect that he was plotting more attacks. As the 9/11 Commission later established, U.S. intelligence officials knew that al-Qaeda had held a planning meeting in Malaysia, found out the names of two recruits who had been present -- Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- and suspected that one and maybe both of them had flown to Los Angeles. Bamford reveals that the NSA had been eavesdropping for months on their calls to Yemen, yet the agency "never made the effort" to trace where the calls originated.
"At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds. All it would have taken was to call nationwide directory assistance -- they would have then discovered both his phone number and address, which were listed in the San Diego phone directory," Bamford writes. "Similarly, if the NSA had traced any of the incoming calls to the [Yemen] ops center, they would have located two of the callers on California soil."
The 1990s brought a quadruple storm of changes that set the stage for the attack by al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi and 17 other young men on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: the end of the Cold War, radically new ways for human beings to communicate, a geometric rise in the amount of electronic data available, and the increasing use of suicide as a technique in warfare. Bamford's book is the sobering story of how America's Cold War national security apparatus has struggled to respond to these changes.
By detailing the failures of the NSA and CIA, Bamford goes where the 9/11 Commission did not fully go. He convincingly makes the case that our intelligence problems had little to do with the limitations imposed on the NSA or other agencies; the NSA had all the legal authority it needed to monitor al-Qaeda's communications and was actively doing so before the 9/11 attacks. (In the hypothetical case of Osama bin Laden crossing into New York, he notes, the relevant law allowed for emergency eavesdropping for up to two days, in which time the NSA could easily have obtained a warrant from a special court to continue the surveillance.) Yet deep-seated divisions and rivalries among U.S. intelligence agencies helped the hijackers go undetected. Bamford explains that Hayden and other top NSA officials wanted to keep the agency's eavesdropping operations "as far away from U.S. territory as possible" for fear of being accused of illegally targeting American citizens, as happened in the 1970s. Rank-and-file NSA workers, meanwhile, resented CIA analysts for "treating them not as equals but as subordinates." And the CIA, in turn, had an almost pathological mistrust of the FBI.
In one riveting passage, Bamford describes how in January 2000 a CIA official refused to forward to the FBI an urgent report on al-Mihdhar's possible presence in the United States. When a low-ranking intelligence official insisted, "You've got to tell the bureau about this," a higher-up CIA officer "put her hand on her hip and said, 'Look, the next attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia -- It's not the FBI's jurisdiction. When we want the FBI to know about it, we'll let them know."
By exploring the current, post-9/11 operations of the NSA, Bamford also goes where congressional oversight committees and investigative journalists still struggle to go. Rather than finding out what went wrong in the run-up to 9/11 and disciplining those who made serious mistakes, the Bush administration declared its need for new authorities to wage a global war on terror. Congress agreed to most of the White House's demands, though we know from other sources that former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle resisted some of the most extreme requests. According to Bamford, the NSA's expanded powers and resources enabled it to collect communications both inside and outside the United States. He quotes a former NSA employee as a witness to the agency's spying on the conversations of Americans who have no connection to terrorism. After suing the NSA for documents, the author obtained considerable evidence that telecommunication companies (with the notable exception of Qwest) knowingly violated U.S. law by cooperating with the NSA to tap fiber optic lines.
In impressive detail, The Shadow Factory tells how private contractors, including some little-known entities with foreign owners, have done the sensitive work of storing and processing the voices and written data of Americans and non-Americans alike. And Bamford warns of worse to come: "There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss -- the abyss from which there is no return."
But here I begin my disagreements with the author. Tyranny is not a function of technology or of surveillance capabilities. Nor does law stand in its way. Tyranny's most reliable enemy is the preference of the American people -- and others on this planet -- for freedom, even if it means sacrificing a little security.
I also strongly disagree with Bamford's emphasis on U.S. foreign policy, and especially our support for Israel, as the motivator behind the Sept. 11 attacks. He cites one person who claims he never saw the 9/11 hijackers in prayer in the months before the attack. But there is too much evidence about the religious views of ringleader Mohammed Atta and the other plotters to discount the influence of radical Islamic fervor and to believe, instead, that they were motivated by anger over an Israeli bombing of Lebanese civilians in 1996; the author's apparent negativity toward Israel is a significant distraction from the content of his book. And though I believe there has been too great a tendency to demonize the 9/11 terrorists by calling them cowards and worse, Bamford is entirely too sympathetic to them for my taste. He refers to them as "soldiers," legitimizes their motives and makes them out to be 19 Davids slinging four deadly aircraft at the American Goliath.
Bamford also focuses too much on the U.S. Constitution. Terrorism is a global problem that requires a global solution. Thus, when President Bush took his lawyer's advice that he did not have to be concerned with international law when he was devising tactics to interrogate, incarcerate and bring suspected terrorists to justice, he put the nation's long-term security at risk.
Still, this revealing and provocative book is necessary reading, perhaps especially for members of Congress who annually reauthorize the work of the NSA. They should look again at the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to reform the congressional committees that watch over the executive branch agencies responsible for protecting us. Unless that oversight is strengthened, the fears expressed in The Shadow Factory will only grow.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sanaa
It was late December and Yemen's capital of Sanaa lay cool beneath the afternoon sun. A fine powder of reddish sand, blown southward from the vast Arabian Desert, coated the labyrinth of narrow alleyways that snake throughout the city. On crowded sidewalks, beneath high walls topped with shards of broken glass, women in black chadors paraded with men in drab suit coats and red-and-white checkered scarves that hung loose like long shawls. It is a city of -well--oiled Kalashnikovs and jewel-encrusted daggers known as jambiyahs; a place where former comrades from the once Marxist south sit on battered sidewalk chairs chewing qat and puffing from hookahs with wrinkled imams from the tribal north.
At the northwest edge of the city in Madbah, a cluttered neighborhood of cinder-block homes and yapping dogs, was a boxy, sand-swept house. Across the street sat a vacant lot littered with stones, bits of concrete, and tufts of greenish weeds. Made of cement and surrounded by a black iron fence, the house had a solid, fortresslike appearance. On the flat roof were three chimneys, one for each floor, and open balconies that were wide and square, like bull pens at a rodeo; glass arches topped the windows and doors.
It was the home of Ahmed -al-Hada, a middle-aged Yemeni who had become friends with Osama bin Laden while fighting alongside him against the Russians in Afghanistan. Hada came from a violent family tribe based for generations in Dhamar Province, about sixty miles south of Sanaa. In a valley of squat, mud-brick houses and green terraced farms, the region was sandwiched between two volcanic peaks in the Yemen Highlands. The area had achieved some fame as a center for the breeding of thoroughbred horses. It also gained fame for kidnappings.
A devoted follower of bin Laden, Hada offered to turn his house into a secret operations center for his friend in Afghanistan. While the rugged Afghan landscape provided bin Laden with security, it was too isolated and remote to manage the day-to-day logistics for his growing worldwide terrorist organization. His sole tool of communication was a gray, battery-powered $7,500 Compact-M satellite phone. About the size of a laptop computer, it could transmit and receive both voice phone calls and fax messages from virtually anywhere in the world over the Inmarsat satellite network. His phone number was 00-873-682505331; the 00 meant it was a satellite call, 873 indicated the phone was in the Indian Ocean area, and 682505331 was his personal number.
Bin Laden needed to set up a separate operations center somewhere outside Afghanistan, somewhere with access to regular telephone service and close to major air links. He took Hada up on his offer, and the house in Yemen quickly became the epicenter of bin Laden's war against America, a logistics base to coordinate his attacks, a switchboard to pass on orders, and a safe house where his field commanders could meet to discuss and carry out operations. Between 1996 and 1998, bin Laden and his top aides made a total of 221 calls to the ops center's phone number, 011-967-1-200-578, using the house to coordinate the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa and to plan the attack of the USS Cole in the port of Aden in 2000.
Also living in the house was Hada's daughter, Hoda, along with her husband, Khalid al-Mihdhar. Standing 5'6" and weighing 142 pounds, Mihdhar had an intelligent face, with a soft, unblemished complexion and a neatly trimmed mustache. Wearing glasses, he had the appearance of a young university instructor. But it was war, not tenure, that interested Mihdhar. He had been training in secret for months to lead a massive airborne terrorist attack against the U.S. Now he was just waiting for the phone call to begin the operation.
Khalid al-Mihdhar began life atop Yemen's searing sandscape on May 16, 1975. Shortly thereafter, he and his family moved to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was the beginning of the oil boom and the Mihdhars, like thousands of others in the poverty-racked country, hoped to take advantage of the rivers of petrodollars then flowing into the Kingdom. They settled in the holy city of Mecca, Khalid's father was successful, and the family became Saudi citizens.
For centuries the Mihdhar tribe was prominent in the remote Yemen provinces that merge invisibly into Saudi Arabia across an endless expanse of drifting sand dunes. Known as the Empty Quarter, the provinces are a geographical twilight zone, a void on the map where governments, borders, and lines of demarcation have scarcely intruded. Horizon to horizon, there are only the occasional Bedouins who pass like a convoy of ships on a sea of sand. In the city of Tarim is the al-Mihdhar mosque, with its strikingly beautiful minaret reaching more than seventeen stories into the sky, the tallest such structure in southern Arabia. It was built in honor of the -fifteenth--century religious leader Omar-al-Mihdhar, the grand patriarch of the tribe.
When Mihdhar was growing up, one of his neighborhood friends was Nawaf al-Hazmi, whose father owned a supermarket and a building in the Nawariya district in northwest Mecca and whose older brother was a police chief in Jizan, a city in southwest Saudi Arabia across the border from Yemen. Darker, more muscular, and a year younger than Khalid, he came from a prominent and financially well-off family of nine sons. His father, Muhammad Salem al-Hazmi, described both Nawaf and his younger brother, Salem, as "well-behaved, nice young men who have been brought up in a family atmosphere free from any social or psychological problems." Nevertheless, Nawaf would later complain that his father once cut him with a knife that left a long scar on his forearm.
Soon after turning eighteen, Hazmi packed a duffel bag and left for Afghanistan to learn the art of warfare. But by 1993 the war against the Soviet occupiers was long over and Osama bin Laden had returned to his contracting business in Sudan. Undeterred, Hazmi called his family from Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghan border, and told them he was going to fight in Chechnya. Very concerned, Muhammad al-Hazmi went to Peshawar to bring his son home. "I went to Peshawar," he recalled. "I found him there. He said he was staying in Pakistan as a trader of frankincense and we returned home together. I asked him to help me in my commercial ventures, including shops and hotels." Speaking of his sons, he added, "In fact, I planned to open branches for them and to find brides for them. But they did not stay for long."
Returning to Mecca with his father, Hazmi met with a key al-Qaeda member and in 1996, bubbling with enthusiasm, convinced Mihdhar to join him in a new war, this one in Bosnia defending fellow Muslims from attacks by the Serbs.
What drove Mihdhar, Hazmi, and thousands of others was a burning need to defend Muslim lands from the West, which had a long history, as they saw it, of invading and occupying their territory, killing and humiliating their families, and supporting their corrupt rulers. The victory in Afghanistan over the Soviets, a superpower, was their first real win and gave many Muslims across the region a sense of unity, fueling an ideology that viewed their separate countries as a single Muslim nation--what they called the "ulema." An occupation or invasion of one Muslim state was therefore an aggression against all Muslim states.
Now with the taste of victory over Russia still sweet in their mouths, adrenaline still pumping through their veins, and a new sense of Muslim nationalism, many were no longer willing to sit and wait for the next encroachment on their lands. The West had long waged war on Islam, they believed; now it was Islam's time to defend itself and fight back. The time had come to go on the offensive.
On August 23, 1996, Osama bin Laden issued his call to action: "My Muslim Brothers of the World," he said. "Your brothers in Palestine and in the land of the two Holy Places [Saudi Arabia] are calling upon your help and asking you to take part in fighting against the enemy--your enemy and their enemy--the Americans and the Israelis. They are asking you to do whatever you can, with your own means and ability, to expel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam."
Turning his attention to the United States, he said, "[We] hold you responsible for all of the killings and evictions of the Muslims and the violation of the sanctities, carried out by your Zionist brothers [Israel] in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance [during Israel's bloody Grapes of Wrath invasion]. More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression [the sanctions] imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the U.S.A., together with the Saudi regime, are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children."
The charges resonated with Mihdhar and Hazmi, and in about 1997 Hazmi returned to Afghanistan, formally swore his loyalty to bin Laden, and fought against the Northern Alliance, possibly with his brother, Salem. Mihdhar followed, and swore his allegiance to the al-Qaeda leader in 1998. They would become the elite of al-Qaeda, among the first seventeen to join from the Arabian Peninsula. Bin Laden would call them "The Founders." Early on, the al-Qaeda leader had developed a special affection and trust--almost father-son at times--for Mihdhar. They shared a common heritage, both sets of ancestors having come from the remote, desolate Yemeni province of Hadramont.
In the spring of 1999, bin Laden and his operations chief, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, worked out a plan to bring their war to the doorstep of the enemy. Using large commercial airliners, they would in one swoop bring mass destruction to America's financial, political, and military centers: the World Trade Center, the White House, and the Pentagon. During the meeting, bin Laden ...
National security expert and former writer for the NEW YORK TIMES James Bamford unearths the massive, technologically advanced organization that is the National Security Agency. This groundbreaking work is sure to ignite questions as to who is the real enemy. Through the filtering of phone calls, messages, and even personal emails, the NSA is quietly utilizing its "Black Widow" computer to sort through data at more than a quadrillion operations per second. Reading with a stern, steady, and collected tone, narrator Paul Michael relates Bamford's findings so as to trigger a response in his listeners, forcing them to take sides on the issues while at the same time making them paranoid about the security of their own personal affairs. L.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
