Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Some former counterterrorism officials have alleged that during Black’s time at CTC, there was more interest in using Al Qaeda to justify building up the bureaucracy of the CIA’s covert actions hub, the Directorate of Operations, than the specific task of stopping bin Laden. “Cofer Black, he arrived, and he was the man, he was the pro from the D.O.,” said veteran CIA official Michael Scheuer, who headed the bin Laden unit from 1995 to 1999 before Black’s appointment. 40Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told Vanity Fair, “There’s some truth to the fact that they didn’t have enough money, but the interesting thing is that they didn’t put any of the money they had into going after al-Qaeda.” Clarke alleged, “They would say ‘Al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda’ when they were trying to get money, and then when you gave them money it didn’t go to al-Qaeda. They were trying to rebuild the D.O. [Directorate of Operations], and so a lot of it went to D.O. infrastructure, and they would say, ‘Well, you can’t start by going after al-Qaeda, you have to repair the whole D.O.’… And what I would say to them is ‘Surely there must be a dollar somewhere in C.I.A. that you could re-program into going after al-Qaeda,’ and they would say ‘No.’ The other way of saying that is everything else they’re doing is more important.” 41

The public blame war over who in the U.S. intelligence community and the Clinton and Bush administrations was responsible for the failure to prevent 9/11 intensified when Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial was published in September 2006. In it, Woodward detailed a meeting that reportedly took place on July 10, 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with Black, then head of the CTC, at CIA headquarters. The two men reviewed current U.S. intelligence on bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Black, Woodward reported, “laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.” 42At the time, “Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.” 43After reviewing the intelligence with Black, Tenet called National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice from the car en route to the White House. When Black and Tenet met with Rice that day, according to Woodward, they “felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.” Black later said, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.” 44

On August 6, 2001, President Bush was at his Crawford Ranch, where he was delivered a Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It twice mentioned the possibility that Al Qaeda operatives may try to hijack airplanes, saying FBI information “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in [the U.S.] consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.” 45Nine days later, Black addressed a secret Pentagon counter-terrorism conference. “We’re going to be struck soon,” Black said. “Many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the U.S.” 46

While the debate on responsibility for 9/11 would continue for years—with Clinton and Bush administration officials hurling stones at one another—it was irrelevant to Cofer Black in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Black found himself in the driver’s seat with a Commander in Chief ready and eager to make Black’s covert action dreams a reality. Black had long been frustrated by the restraints and prohibitions governing U.S. covert actions—namely a prohibition against assassinations—and the war on terror had changed the rules of the game overnight. “My personal emotion was, It is now officially started,” Black said. “The analogy would be the junkyard dog that had been chained to the ground was now going to be let go. And I just couldn’t wait.” 47

In his initial meeting with President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, Black came prepared with a PowerPoint presentation, and he threw papers on the floor as he spoke of deploying forces inside Afghanistan. 48On September 13, he told Bush point-blank that his men would aim to kill Al Qaeda operatives. “When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” Black promised, in a performance that would earn him a designation in the inner circle of the administration as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.” 49The President reportedly loved Black’s style; when he told Bush the operation would not be bloodless, the President said, “Let’s go. That’s war. That’s what we’re here to win.” 50

That September, President Bush gave the green light to Black and the CIA to begin inserting special operations forces into Afghanistan. Before the core CIA team, Jawbreaker, deployed on September 27, 2001, Black gave his men direct and macabre directions. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders, and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement,” Black told covert CIA operative Gary Schroen. “I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured, I want them dead…. They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.” 51Schroen said it was the first time in his thirty-year career he had been ordered to assassinate an adversary rather than attempting a capture. 52Black asked if he had made himself clear. “Perfectly clear, Cofer,” Schroen told him. “I don’t know where we’ll find dry ice out there in Afghanistan, but I think we can certainly manufacture pikes in the field.” 53Black later explained why this would be necessary. “You’d need some DNA,” Black said. “There’s a good way to do it. Take a machete, and whack off his head, and you’ll get a bucketful of DNA, so you can see it and test it. It beats lugging the whole body back!” 54

As the United States plotted its invasion of Afghanistan, Black continued with his apparent fixation with corporal mutilation when he accompanied Colin Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, to Moscow for meetings with Russian officials. When the Russians, speaking from experience, warned Black of the prospect for a U.S. defeat at the hands of mujahedeen, Black shot back. “We’re going to kill them,” he said. “We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.” 55Interestingly, the covert operations Black organized immediately after 9/11 relied heavily on private contractors, answering directly to him, rather than active-duty military forces. Black’s men used their contacts to recruit about sixty former Delta Force, ex-SEALs, and other Special Forces operators as independent contractors for the initial mission, making up the majority of the first Americans into Afghanistan after 9/11. 56

In late 2001, Black was exactly where he had wanted to be his entire career, playing an essential role in crafting and implementing the Bush administration’s counterterror policies. “There was this enormous sense among the officers that had lived in this campaign before Sept. 11 that… finally, these lawyers and these cautious decision makers who had gotten in our way before can be overcome, and we can be given the license that we deserve to have had previously,” said Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars . 57Black’s CTC rapidly expanded from three hundred staffers to twelve hundred. 58“It was the Camelot of counterterrorism,” a former counterterrorism official told the Washington Post . “We didn’t have to mess with others—and it was fun.” 59People were abducted from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hot spots and flown to the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—most held without charge for years, designated as enemy combatants and denied access to any legal system. Others were kept at hellish prison camps inside Afghanistan and other countries. In 2002, Black testified to Congress about the new “operational flexibility” employed in the war on terror. “This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11,” Black said. “After 9/11 the gloves come off.” 60