Direct Action

EPILOGUE

IN THE EARLY EVENINGof November 18, 2003, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and his chief counsel held a two-and-a-half-hour off-the-record meeting with three unidentified individuals in HPSCI’s bubble room, which is located in a secure area on an upper floor of the U.S. Capitol building. Left behind after the session was a thick folder of materials, which were secured in the chairman’s personal document safe. The meeting was never logged in any of HPSCI’s formal records, and HPSCI’s chief counsel requested that the U.S. Capitol Police officer manning the security checkpoint directly outside the hallway refrain from checking the identities of the visitors and entering their names in the committee’s sign-in book.

Precisely what was said at that meeting is still unknown. But a string of subsequent events-virtually all of them covered in the media-might serve as an accurate indicator.

• On December 24, 2003, Air France canceled the December 24 Air France Flights 068 and 070, and December 25’s Air France Flight 068-all to Los Angeles. The return flights to Paris, Wednesday’s Flight 069, and Thursday’s 069 and 071, were also canceled.

• That same day, French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin issued a statement explaining that the preemptive measure had been taken “on the basis of information, currently being checked, which was gathered in the framework of Franco-American cooperation in the fight against terrorism.” According to a report on French television and sourced to unnamed security officials, the flights were aborted because intelligence information suggested al-Qa’ida was to bring down multiple civilian aircraft somewhere between Paris and Los Angeles during the Christmas holidays. Some newspapers reported that thirteen passengers were detained for questioning. According to press reports, all thirteen were released.

• A short article in the December 26Le Matin reported that in an unintended consequence of the increased security at Charles de Gaulle airport, three expensive Louis Vuitton Montsouris knapsacks-one carried by a passenger on Flight 068, another by someone traveling on Flight 070, and a third on Thursday’s Flight 068-were confiscated when French customs inspectors discovered the bags were counterfeits. The passengers, according to the story, were interrogated, and after it had been established that they believed they’d bought genuine Vuitton merchandise, the knapsacks were replaced on the spot by the French authorities with real Montsouris.

• Beginning in early January, Washington reporters who covered the intelligence beat found themselves the recipients of an unexpected trickle of leaks from Capitol Hill sources detailing the sorry state of CIA in general and the Directorate of Operations in particular. By the beginning of March, the trickle had become a torrent, and DCI George Tenet began to realize that someone up on Capitol Hill had painted a huge target on his back.

• On January 19, 2004, Al Jazeera reported in a short tell-story that Moroccan authorities, acting on what was described by Mukhabarat sources as the fruits of a successful interrogation, discovered an Islamist bomb factory in a residential villa on the outskirts of the city of Safi, a hotbed of Islamist activity 250 kilometers southwest of the capital city of Rabat. Six Salafist radicals were killed during the assault. Two Moroccan Special Forces soldiers were wounded.

• At 2:24P.M. on Wednesday, May 26, 2004, the CIA’s congressional liaison was summoned to the HPSCI offices, where he was handed a single page of language that would be included in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2005. The officer was instructed to show it to CIA’s top leadership. The page read as follows:

All is not well in the world of clandestine human intelligence collection (HUMINT). The DCI himself has stated that five more years will be needed to build a viable HUMINT capability. The Committee, in the strongest of possible terms, asserts that the Directorate of Operations (DO) needs fixing. For too long the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities. There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action…If the CIA continues to ignore the experience of many of its best, brightest, and most experienced officers, and continues to equate criticism from within and without-especially from the oversight committees-as commentary unworthy even of consideration, no matter how constructive, informed and well-meaning that criticism may be, they do so at their peril. The DO will become nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core-mission oriented enterprise the DO once was, is becoming a fleeting memory. With each day it becomes harder to resurrect. The Committee highlights, with concern, the fact that it took only a year or two in the mid-1990s to decimate the capabilities of the CIA, that we are now in the 8^thyear of rebuild, and still we are 5 years away from being healthy. This is tragic. It should never happen again.

• It has been rumored but not confirmed by CIA sources that shortly after the congressional liaison faxed the page to Langley’s seventh floor, someone in the DCI’s office suite was heard to shout, “I don’t care what you say. That goddamn son of a bitch Tony Wyman wrote that crap.”

• On Wednesday evening, June 2, 2004, George John Tenet called President George W. Bush and informed him he would be resigning as DCI the next morning.

• On Thursday, June 3, 2004, Tenet resigned, effective July 11.

• On Tuesday, August 10, 2004, President George W. Bush nominated Congressman Porter J. Goss of Florida as the new director of central intelligence. Goss would be the second member of Congress to hold the title. Goss was confirmed by the Senate and took office on the twenty-fourth of September, 2004.