Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda Read Online Free PDF Page B

had no office or staff specifically assigned to thinking about fighting terrorists around the world. Jeff Schloesser and his new team would be filling a crucial void.
    At the end of the week, Abizaid convened his crisis-action team and singled out his newest chief terrorist hunter. “Have we killed any Al Qaeda yet?” Abizaid demanded, staring at Schloesser. Schloesser, still trying to find his way around the labyrinthine halls of the Pentagon, wrote that night in one of the small, green notebooks that he kept for every assignment since he was a young captain: “Not sure, too much focus on the Taliban in Afghanistan and not enough on our global fight against Al Qaeda.” Schloesser was not alone in grappling with America’s newest Public Enemy Number One.
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    Within the U.S. government on September 11, 2001, there were peaks and valleys in terms of understanding Al Qaeda, but mostly valleys. The Clinton administration had reacted with increasing alarm after Al Qaeda’s attacks in 1998 against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as well as the strike on the Cole two years later. But President Clinton never ordered more than cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets. When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, few of his advisers had any detailed understanding of how Al Qaeda was organized, how it was equipped, and how it could train its operatives to carry out the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. As one senior White House official who closely monitored terrorist intelligence reports recalled, “There were people up and down the hallways who couldn’t spell Al Qaeda. Literally they didn’t know a thing. I remember being asked, ‘Is it all one word or two?’”
    The new administration’s greater national security concerns centered on building antimissile defenses against a rogue state like North Korea or countering the growing military influence of China throughout Asia. After September 11, there was a mad scramble to catch up. Within the inner circles of the Bush administration, officials vented frustration at the lack of clear understanding about the nature of this new enemy. At the same time, intense debates involving senior policy makers and intelligence officials centered on how precisely to define the enemy beyond Al Qaeda. “Pretend it’s a box,” explained one participating intelligence official, recounting a primer he gave to senior White House aides. “Who is inside the box and who is outside the box with this enemy? Is it Hezbollah? Is it Hamas? There is a lot of debate about how big this box is and what you put in it.”
    In the months after the 9/11 attacks, government officials arrived at a tentative consensus about transnational threats with global reach. Al Qaeda and its associated groups became the main target. But intelligence officials and policy makers struggled with how to define the nature of the enemy, where it resided, and its nexus to state actors, including Iran, Sudan, and Iraq. It was a question that grew increasingly politically charged beginning in early 2002, as senior Bush administration officials sought to draw links between Al Qaeda and the government of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
    In the initial weeks after the attack, the more than fifty organizations that make up the U.S. government’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to try to answer these questions. But often they found they spoke past each other, had different priorities, and played diverging and uncoordinated roles in combating the new threat.
    At the National Security Agency, the supersecret eavesdropping agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, a call went out from its director, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, to open the spigots and provide as much information as possible to the FBI, which was responsible for tracking terrorists inside the United States. Little of the NSA’s technical wizardry had been aimed at Al Qaeda before 9/11. As