Bin Laden Issue Station - New View of Al-Qaeda, 1996–1998

New View of Al-Qaeda, 1996–1998

Soon after its inception, the Station began to develop a new, deadlier vision of al-Qaeda. In spring 1996, in what Scheuer called "a stroke of luck", Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl walked into the US's Eritrean embassy and established his credentials "as a former senior employee" of Bin Laden. Al-Fadl had lived in the US in the mid-1980s, and had been recruited to the Afghan mujaheddin through the al-Khifa center at the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn. Al-Khifa was the interface of "Operation Cyclone, the American effort to support the mujaheddin", and the Pakistan-based Services Office of Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden, whose purpose was to raise recruits for the struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al-Fadl had joined al-Qaeda in 1989, apparently in Afghanistan. Peter Bergen called him the third member of the organization (presumably after Azzam and bin Laden). But al-Fadl had since embezzled $110,000 from al-Qaeda, and now wanted to defect.

Al-Fadl was persuaded to come to the United States by Jack Cloonan, an FBI special agent who had been seconded to the Bin Laden Issue Station. There, from late 1996, under the protection of Cloonan and his colleagues, al-Fadl "provided a major breakthrough on the creation, character, direction and intentions of al Qaeda". "Bin Laden, the CIA now learned, had planned multiple terrorist operations and aspired to more"—including the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium. Another "walk-in" source (since identified as L'Houssaine Kherchtou) "corroborated" al-Fadl's claims. "By the summer of 1998", Scheuer later summed up, "we had accumulated an extraordinary array of information on and its intentions."

Unfortunately the "reams" of data that the Station had been "developing ... had not been pulled together and synthesized for the rest of the government". Policymakers knew there was a dangerous individual named Osama bin Laden whom they had been trying to capture and bring to trial. But they did not yet share the Bin Laden unit's consciousness of a structured worldwide organization called al-Qaeda, referring rather to bin Laden and his "associates" or "network". A 1997 CIA National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism only briefly mentioned bin Laden. The intelligence community did not in fact describe al-Qaeda until 1999.

Al Qaeda operated as an organization in more than sixty countries, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center calculated by late 1999 . Its formal, sworn, hard-core membership might number in the hundreds. Thousands more joined allied militias such as the Taliban or the Chechen rebel groups or Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines or the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan. ...