We fearful, anxious masses can never get enough information on how the War on Terror is being fought. What is happening behind the scenes? Is our phone being tapped and our email intercepted — or not? Who are the personalities really in charge? FBI or CIA? Bush or Cheney? And how about the terrorists? Are they on the run? Dead or just silently lying in wait? We want to know every last detail.
Luckily, this week Time provides us with this exclusive and stunning revelation from Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine: George Tenet is … a hugger.
Yes, it’s true, in a spring 2002 meeting with Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Tenet gave the man a big hug before letting him know that Al Qaeda was now apparently turning its sights on Saudi Arabia. “Scotch?” Bandar asked Tenet. And over a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, the details were discussed.
But, seriously, the excerpt, when it doesn’t veer into the realm of corny recreated conversation, does offer stunning revelation.
The concept of the “one-percent doctrine” we are told comes from Vice President Cheney and the idea is that, as Suskind explains it, “If there’s a 1 percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response. So, now spoken, it stood: a standard of action that would frame events and responses from the Administration for years to come.”
The excerpt includes what we hope is the book’s must frightening discovery — that in 2003, Al Qaeda was less then two months away from attacking the New York City subway system with small canisters of hydrogen cyanide, which Suskind describes as “a colorless, highly volatile liquid that is soluble and stable in water. It has a faint odor, like peach kernels or bitter almonds. When it is turned into gas and inhaled, it is lethal.”
Even scarier, according to the book, the only thing that stopped this mass gassing of the MTA was Al Qaeda deputy Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s mysterious decision to not go forward with it, even after the plan was operational.
What we found most fascinating about this whole story is the revelation that the CIA has informers inside Al Qaeda, here a man pseudonymously called “Ali” who has enough knowledge to let the Agency know about the hydrogen cyanide plot and its cancellation. We had always been led to believe that the human intelligence on Osama and company was almost zero. It turns out that it is actually substantial.
Another revealing article, though one that was slightly overlooked last week, was The Atlantic Monthly‘s account of Irhabi 007, the online jihadi who became such an asset to terrorist networks. It came out in the same issue as The Atlantic‘s comprehensive profile-turned-obituary of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who was conveniently offed as the magazine was hitting the stands. But the story of the young terrorist Irhabi is just as compelling as that of Zarqawi.
Writer Nadya Labi describes how “Irhabi was part of a new and growing terrorist vanguard. After 9/11 and the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda lost much of its infrastructure. No longer able to recruit in plain sight, its strategists recognized that the Internet could become a vast global recruiting ground — in effect, a new, borderless Afghanistan … And Al Qaeda also realized that in jihadi chat rooms it could find precisely what it most needed to maintain its ranks of recruits and suicide bombers: impressionable young Muslim men (and some women), many of them second-generation immigrants living in the United States and Europe.”
Even more fascinating than the story of Irhabi’s activity is the story of how he was brought down. Irhabi accidentally left traces of his IP address in various places. One person who became suspicious was Gregor Loock, computer expert and good citizen, who sold a strange domain name to a customer who turned out to be Irhabi. But look what happened after Loock wanted to do something with the evidence he had accumulated: “Loock went to the FBI’s Web site, which has a section for tips from the public, and filled out a form. No response. He called and spoke to an agent, who promised that another agent would be in touch. No response. He talked to his brother-in-law, who is in the Navy and forwarded the information to the CIA. No response. Eventually he contacted an agent at the Department of Homeland Security, and, as he put it, ‘things went pretty fast after that.’ The agent visited Loock’s house with a computer specialist, and Loock handed over everything that he’d discovered: the credit-card numbers that he thought were stolen, the files, and his searches of the IP addresses.”
Eventually a man who is mostly likely Irhabi, 22-year-old British resident Younis Tsouli, was taken into custody and now awaits trial.
And us, we’re still just as scared as ever.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.