Secret Invasion Quotes

If you always try to subjugate people by coercion, because you are strong, then sooner or later you will run into somebody who is just as strong, if not stronger. Then you'll be in trouble.

To catch a wild animal, you have to use the right bait. What happens to the bait? I haven't decided yet.

Guilt often resembles shadows, playing games in the dark.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.

John: I'm experiencing an odd sensation. I think it might be patriotism. Spitfire: Steady. Too much of that can damage your health.

There are no such things as happy endings. Never. They're totally manufactured by fiction writers who choose to end the story on a high point.

There were whole secret sections that did their work underground then, and sections of the London tube system were used as part of it. There were also plenty of bunkers and tunnels built for use in the event of an invasion.", FADE by Kailin Gow

American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation.

When Captain America died, Americans heard it in an American way: through the media. When Captain Britain died, the British felt it in their chests.

Sometime in the last forty-eight hours, Lily had discovered the great secret of pain: it thrived on the unknown, on the knowledge that there was a greater pain out there, something more excruciating that might yet be breached. The body was constantly waiting. When you took away the uncertainty, when you controlled the pain yourself, it was definitely easier to bear,...

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence -- on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

Even President Reagan couldn’t understand him. During an early briefing Casey delivered to the national security cabinet, Reagan slipped Vice President Bush a note: “Did you understand a word he said?” Reagan later told William F. Buckley, “My problem with Bill was that I didn’t understand him at meetings. Now, you can ask a person to repeat himself once. You can ask him twice. But you can’t ask him a third time. You start to sound rude. So I’d just nod my head, but I didn’t know what he was actually saying.” Such was the dialogue for six years between the president and his intelligence chief in a nuclear-armed nation running secret wars on four continents.

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.

I don’t think we really had made the leap in our mind that we are no longer safe behind these two great oceans,” Armitage said later.9

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

The al-Sauds were but one militia among many until they forged a fateful alliance with an austere and martial desert preacher, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab.

Even I won't defy her. She is terrible." "Let me tell you a secret, General. I am worse.

The Taliban kept spinning off in new and bizarre directions, however. On March 1 the movement announced its intention to destroy all the statues in Afghanistan that depicted human form.

And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory.

By 1986, however, that Afghan cause entangled increasingly with the international Islamist networks whose leaders had a more ambitious goal: the toppling of corrupt and antireligious governments across the Islamic world.

Large quantities of fine graphite were also used to build the chain-reaction piles at the Los Alamos atomic weapons programme and within 48 hours of the capture of the island's capital, and while the opposing forces were still fighting, arrangements were made to ship 8,000 tons of graphite from Madagascar to the USA and UK. Little can the Japanese have realized that their failure to capture Madagascar before the Allies could intervene in 1942 would lead to the cataclysmic events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 which brought the Second World War to such a violent and dramatic conclusion.

The Qatari minister of religious endowments, Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid al-Tahni, was known to harbor Islamists loyal to bin Laden. If they asked the Qatar government for help in seizing bin Laden, it was likely that Mohammed would be alerted.

A beam of pink light blinded him; he felt dreadful pain in his head, and clapped his hands to his eyes. I am blind! he realized. With the pain and the pink light came understanding, an acute knowledge; he knew that Zina was not a human woman, and he knew, further, that the boy Manny was not a human boy. This was not a real world he was in; he understood that because the beam of pink light had told him that. This world is a simulation, and something living and intelligent and sympathetic wanted him to know. Something cares about me and it has penetrated this world to warn me, he realized, and it is camouflaged as this world so that the master of this world, the lord of this unreal realm, will not know; not know it is here and not know it has told me. This is a terrible secret to know, he thought. I could be killed for knowing this.

The USS Cole was a billion-dollar command and attack ship equipped with computer-linked radar that could follow more than one hundred airplanes, ships, and missile targets at once. It had relatively little defense, however, against three suicide bombers in a thousand-dollar skiff.

The Demiurge has his henchmen: called Archons, who insert strange thoughts into people’s minds. The Demiurge wants total control of the Earth’s planetary destiny and is the greatest threat to humanity. ‘All secrets are in Saturn,’ declared Pythagoras, possibly implying that the Demiurge had made his hoe one the Planet Saturn. Origen of Alexandria (188 CE – 254 CE), also known as Origen Adamantius (‘man of steel’), was one of the earliest and most important Christian scholars. He stated plainly that Yaldabaoth (one of the names of the Demiurge) was the Planet Saturn.

I’m here because I want to underscore how important this issue is,” Berger explained to Rice. Later, in the West Wing of the White House, Berger told his successor, “You’re going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and bin Laden specifically than any issue.

Still, the Pakistanis beat the CIA’s systems. In Quetta in 1983, ISI officers were caught colluding with Afghan rebels to profit by selling off CIA-supplied weapons. In another instance, the Pakistan army quietly sold the CIA its own surplus .303 rifles and about 30 million bullets. A ship registered in Singapore picked up about 100,000 guns in Karachi, steamed out to sea, turned around, came back to port, and off-loaded the guns, pretending they had come from abroad.

The Soviets did not have the luxury of surrendering. Asked why there were no Red Army soldiers in his prisons, Massoud replied, “Hatred for the Russians is just too great. Many mujahedin have lost their families or homes through communist terror. Their first reaction when coming across a Russian is to kill him.”20

All men and all women have their secret gardens, whose gates they guard against the profane invasion of the vulgar crowd. These are visual pictures of what they would do if they could do as they pleased. The lucky ones find the right time, place, and person, and get to do it, while the rest must wander wistfully outside their own walls.

Both at the CIA and the White House, almost everyone involved in the closely held planning knew what was likely: The tribal agents would say that they were going to try to take bin Laden captive, but in fact they would launch what CIA officers referred to as “the Afghan ambush,” in which you “open up with everything you have, shoot everybody that’s out there, and then let God sort ’em out,” as Gary Schroen put it. Schroen figured that the agents would return to them and say, “We killed the big guy. I’m sorry.

Roosevelt’s agents on the Arabian peninsula, some of them oil prospectors, had begun to glimpse the vast wealth sloshing beneath the sands. They had urged their president to embrace the Saudi royals before the British wheedled in, and Roosevelt did, flattering Abdul Aziz as best he could and winning limited pledges of military and economic cooperation.

In my opinion, it was time for these kids to get a life.

...The barbarians are at the gates." "The barbarians broke down the gates a long time ago... They're living among us now and devouring our children.

Clinton had few experts in intelligence to draw upon after his election in 1992. The Democrats had been out of the executive branch for twelve years.

There was no American policy on Afghan politics at the time, only the de facto promotion of Pakistani goals as carried out by Pakistani intelligence. The CIA forecasted repeatedly during this period that postwar Afghanistan was going to be an awful mess; nobody could prevent that. Let the Pakistanis sort out the regional politics. This was their neighborhood.

Then Deborah stood at the wicket gate, the boundary, and there was a woman with outstretched hand, demanding tickets. "Pass through," she said when Deborah reached her. "We saw you coming." The wicket gate became a turnstile. Deborah pushed against it and there was no resistance, she was through. "What is it?" she asked. "Am I really here at last? Is this the bottom of the pool?" "It could be," smiled the woman. "There are so many ways. You just happened to choose this one." Other people were pressing to come through. They had no faces, they were only shadows. Deborah stood aside to let them by, and in a moment they had gone, all phantoms. "Why only now, tonight?" asked Deborah. "Why not in the afternoon, when I came to the pool?" "It's a trick," said the woman. "You seize on the moment in time. We were here this afternoon. We're always here. Our life goes on around you, but nobody knows it. The trick's easier by night, that's all." "Am I dreaming, then?" asked Deborah. "No," said the woman, "this isn't a dream. And it isn't death, either. It's the secret world." The secret world... It was something Deborah had always known, and now the pattern was complete. The memory of it, and the relief, were so tremendous that something seemed to burst inside her heart. "Of course..." she said, "of course..." and everything that had ever been fell into place. There was no disharmony. The joy was indescribable, and the surge of feeling, like wings about her in the air, lifted her away from the turnstile and the woman, and she had all knowledge. That was it - the invasion of knowledge. ("The Pool")

The clandestine alliance between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was grounded in history. Each was a young, insecure nation that saw Islam as central to its identity. Pakistani troops had been hired by the Saudis in the past for security deployments in the kingdom. The Saudi air force had secretly provided air cover over Karachi during Pakistan’s 1971 war with India.4

The Americans were the “main enemy” of Muslims worldwide, an angry bin Laden told a British journalist who visited him in an eastern Afghan mountain camp weeks after his arrival in Jalalabad. Saudi Arabian authorities were only “secondary enemies,” he declared. As bin Laden saw it, the world had now reached “the beginning of war between Muslims and the United States.”34

they could not prove bin Laden’s personal responsibility for the attack—at least, the evidence would not meet the standards of a criminal indictment. Nor could they provide specific proof of bin Laden’s role that Clinton could cite if he wished to publicly justify retaliation. Yet the CIA’s officers told colleagues that they were dead certain of bin Laden’s involvement.

the United States constructed its most active regional counterterrorism partnerships with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, despite evidence that both governments had been penetrated by al Qaeda.

Nor did the United States have a strategy for engagement, democratization, secular education, and economic development among the peaceful but demoralized majority populations of the Islamic world.

Terrorism is often confused or equated with . . . guerrilla warfare,” the terrorism theorist Bruce Hoffman once wrote. “ This is not surprising, since guerrillas often employ the same tactics (assassination, kidnapping, bombings of public gathering-places, hostage-taking, etc.) for the same purposes (to intimidate or coerce, thereby affecting behavior through the arousal of fear) as terrorists.”34

John the Skrull: You say you've taken magic? Well all right, lads, all right. I could do the "Spartacus" thing, change into one of you, get lost among you. Live for five more minutes. But you know what? I'm not going to die looking like you! I don't want to be one of the fascists who made my people into morons! Who took something beautiful like Excalibur here and made it into just.. a.. bit of metal.

United States willing to confront the royal families of neighboring energy-rich kingdoms such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, even when sections of those governments also appeased and nurtured al Qaeda.

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.

You’re basically asking for the overthrow of the Taliban,” an incredulous midlevel State Department officer told Qayum Karzai in one meeting that August. “I’m not sure if our government is prepared to do that.”38

President Clinton, weakened by impeachment proceedings and boxed in by a hostile Republican majority in Congress, proved unwilling or unable to force the astonishingly passive Pentagon to pursue military options.

You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

The Buddhas in Afghanistan were older even than Islam. Thousands of Muslim soldiers had crossed Afghanistan to India over the centuries, but none of them had ever felt compelled to destroy the Buddhas. “When they have spared these statues for fifteen hundred years, all these Muslims who have passed by them, how are you a different Muslim from them?” Haider asked. “Maybe they did not have the technology to destroy them,” Omar speculated.

Al Qaeda was growing, and its sanctuary in Afghanistan allowed ever more ambitious operations. Within the CIA and at interagency White House sessions the Counterterrorist Center officers spoke starkly. “Al Qaeda is training and planning in Afghanistan, and their goal is to destroy the United States,” they declared, as one official recalled it. “Unless we attack their safe haven, they are going to get continually stronger and stronger.”29

Clinton himself seemed to lean in both directions. If anything, by his actions and decisions the president seemed to favor lethal force against bin Laden and al-Zawahiri if he could find a way to make an immaculate strike.

In their early briefings, Clarke’s office described bin Laden as an “existential” threat to the United States, meaning that the danger he posed went beyond the dozens or hundreds of casualties al Qaeda might inflict in serial bombing attacks. Bin Laden and his followers sought mass American fatalities and would use weapons of mass destruction in American cities if they could, Clarke and officers at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center firmly believed.

Bashir told bin Laden to move out. Bin Laden replied, according to a Sudanese official involved in the exchange, “If you think it will be good for you, I will leave. But let me tell you one thing: If I stay or if I go, the Americans will not leave you alone.”30 Osama bin Laden now had every reason to believe that the United States was his primary persecutor. His political theology identified many enemies, but it was America that forced him into flight.

America failed during the late 1990s to forge an effective antiterrorism partnership with India, whose regional interests, security resources, and vast Muslim population offered great potential for covert penetrations of Afghanistan.

The Americans struggled to understand just how much support reached bin Laden in Afghanistan from Saudi sources. It appeared to be substantial, even into 2000. A Saudi government audit of the National Commercial Bank, the kingdom’s largest, showed that at least $3 million had flowed from its accounts to bin Laden. One of Saudi Arabia’s largest charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, acknowledged that it had sent about $60 million to the Taliban.25

Unwilling to accept the uncertainties and high political costs of a military confrontation with the Taliban, American diplomats also suspended disbelief and lazily embraced Saudi and Pakistani arguments that the Taliban would mature and moderate.

The Afghans whom Yousaf trained uniformly denounced suicide attack proposals as against their religion. It was only the Arab volunteers—from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, and other countries, who had been raised in an entirely different culture, spoke their own language, and preached their own interpretations of Islam while fighting far from their homes and families—who later advocated suicide attacks. Afghan jihadists, tightly woven into family, clan, and regional social networks, never embraced suicide tactics in significant numbers.18

It was the debut of a strategy employed by the Saudi royal family throughout the twentieth century: Threatened by Islamic radicalism, they embraced it, hoping to retain control. The al-Sauds’ claims to power on the Arabian peninsula were weak and grew largely from conquests made by allied jihadists. They now ruled the holiest shrines in worldwide Islam. There seemed to them no plausible politics but strict official religiosity. Many among the royal family were themselves true believers. Theirs was, after all, the only modern nationstate created by jihad.7

Abdul Aziz embraced Wahhabi doctrine. He sponsored a new, fierce, semi-independent vanguard of Ikhwan, or Brothers, war-fighting believers who dressed in distinctive white turbans and trimmed their beards and mustaches to express Islamic solidarity. The Ikhwan conquered village after village, town after town. In Wahhab’s name they enforced bans on alcohol, tobacco, embroidered silk, gambling, fortune-telling, and magic. They denounced telephones, radios, and automobiles as affronts to God’s law. When a motor truck first appeared in their territory, they set it on fire and sent its driver fleeing on foot.

Atta selected early September after determining Congress would be in session. Although bin Laden continued to lobby for the White House as a target, Atta still favored the Capitol, believing it would be easier to strike; the evidence suggests the decision may have remained unresolved until the very end.35

THE OPPORTUNITIES missed by the United States on the way to September 2001 extended well beyond the failure to exploit fully an alliance with Massoud. Indifference, lassitude, blindness, paralysis, and commercial greed too often shaped American foreign policy in Afghanistan and South Asia during the 1990s.

Clinton directed available funds away from countries like Afghanistan and toward the neediest cases in Africa, a dying continent that Lake and the new AID director, Brian Atwood, felt had been neglected for too long by Republican administrations. “Nobody wanted to return to the hot spots of the Reagan-Bush years,” such as Afghanistan, recalled one member of Clinton’s team at the aid agency. “They just wanted them to go away.” South Asia was “just one of those black holes out there.” Atwood faced hostility from Republicans in Congress who argued that American development aid was being wasted in poor, chaotic countries

The bin Laden unit’s analysts were so intense about their work that they made some of their CIA colleagues uncomfortable. The unit had about twenty-five professionals in the summer of 1999. They called themselves “the Manson Family” because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.

Washington typically coddled undemocratic and corrupt Muslim governments, even as these countries’ frustrated middle classes looked increasingly to conservative interpretations of Islam for social values and political ideas. In this way America unnecessarily made easier, to at least a small extent, the work of al Qaeda recruiters.

Hardly anyone in Washington or at Langley yet saw the full significance of bin Laden and al Qaeda. When President Clinton signed Executive Order 12947 on January 23, 1995, imposing sanctions on twelve terrorist groups because of their role in disrupting the Middle East peace process, neither al Qaeda nor bin Laden made the list.31

The CIA’s job was to tell presidents about dangerous surprises, it was that simple. This led Tenet quickly to the threat of terrorism, missiles, and weapons of mass destruction. Through discussions at the White House he absorbed and then recapitulated Clinton’s own emerging obsessions with terrorism and especially biological weapons.

Outgoing President Bush, who had served briefly as CIA director during the Ford administration, had been the agency’s most attentive White House patron in decades. He invited senior clandestine service officers to Christmas parties and to weekends at Camp David. He drew agency analysts and operators into key decision-making meetings.

In Peshawar during the 1980s he had been overshadowed by Abdullah Azzam. In Saudi Arabia he was just one rich young sheikh among hundreds. But in Khartoum his wealth made him a rare and commanding figure. He was powerful enough to order men to their deaths. Yet he fashioned himself a lecturer-businessman, an activist theologian in the image of Azzam.

PJs use parachuting skills to raid into enemy territory to rescue and save lives; army rangers parachute onto the battle field to kill enemy soldiers and capture ground, while a Green Beret will infiltrate a remote, hostile area to teach the local populace how to fight and defend themselves against an enemy. Recon marines can sneak into enemy territory and learn all their secrets. SEALs are small direct-action-oriented teams that can infiltrate areas by sea air, or land to accomplish their objectives, such as capturing or destroying high value targets. Air force combat controllers call in airstrikes, help seize enemy airfields, and use their air traffic control skills to orchestrate everything from large-scale aerial invasions to small insertions of American planes and soldiers. All of these elite units consider themselves exclusive brotherhoods. Members of these outfits live at the most dangerous extreme of human experience and entrust their lives to each other. They focus on a common mission and share unique experiences of adventure and danger.

the Taliban’s leaders had no idea where this turn in American attitudes had come from. They made little effort to find out. When pressed on the issue of education for girls by the occasional visiting American delegation, they said, “This is God’s law,” recalled the State Department’s Leonard Scensny. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Leave us alone.

There were small changes stirring in American policy as Clinton entered his second term. Hillary Clinton had visited India in 1995 and became determined to push her husband toward greater involvement in the region. Madeleine Albright, who arrived as secretary of state, was more sharply attuned to human rights violators such as the Taliban than Warren Christopher had been.

Hillary Clinton used a major speech about human rights at the United Nations to single out the Taliban. “Even now the Taliban in Afghanistan are blocking girls from attending schools,” Clinton said. The Taliban were harassing those “who would speak out against this injustice.” It was the first time that either of the Clintons had seriously criticized the Taliban in public.24

Secular-minded royalist Afghans from the country’s thin, exiled tribal leadership and commercial classes said they had long warned both the Americans and the Saudis, as one put it, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins.” But the Americans had been convinced by Pakistani intelligence, they complained, that only the most radical Islamists could fight with determination.

Clinton’s desire to kill them was very clear to us early on,” recalled one of his senior aides. But he did not commit himself all the way. The first MON he signed in the summer of 1998 authorized covert action aimed at taking bin Laden and his aides into custody for trial. The ambiguous language might have been crafted to assure Janet Reno’s support, but Clinton etched his own signature on the memo

The CIA plan to capture bin Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and renewed by Reagan in the same Executive Order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents to develop their plan, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit. The Afghans had to try to take bin Laden alive. CIA officers were assigned to sit down with the team leaders to make it as clear as possible. “I want to reinforce this with you,” station chief Gary Schroen told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”9

Brzeziński: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army had invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the truth, kept secret up to now, is quite different: it was in fact on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive on clandestine aid to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on that very day I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my view aid was going to bring about a Soviet military intervention. Nouvel Observateur: When the Soviets justified their intervention by claiming that they meant to counter a secret intervention by the United States in Afghanistan, no one believed them. However there was some truth in that.... You don't regret anything today? Brzeziński: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border I wrote to President Carter roughly the following: "We now have the opportunity to give the USSR its own Vietnam War". [warmonger's unrepentant admission that the U.S. overthrew the government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and sold it as a Soviet invasion]

In the absence of alternatives the State Department had taken up Unocal’s agenda as its own. Whatever the merits of the project, the sheer prominence it received by 1996 distorted the message and meaning of American power. American tolerance of the Taliban was publicly and inextricably linked to the financial goals of an oil corporation. There were by now about 1.5 million Afghan war dead, dating back to the Soviet invasion. The land was desolate, laced with mines. The average life expectancy for an Afghan was about forty-six years. The country ranked 173 out of 175 countries on the United Nations human development index.42 Yet the few American officials who paid attention to Afghanistan at all talked as if it was a tax-free zone ripe for industrial revival, a place where vocational education in metallurgy could lead to a political breakthrough.

GEORGE TENET WAS AWARE of Osama bin Laden. He supported the small bin Laden tracking unit in the Counterterrorist Center. But by the end of 1997, neither the new CIA director nor the agency placed bin Laden very high on their priority lists. The agency’s view of bin Laden remained similar to Prince Turki’s: He was a blowhard, a dangerous and wealthy egomaniac, and a financier of other radicals, but he was also isolated in Afghanistan.

In any event, the Hamburg four finalized their plans for pilot training in the United States without attracting attention from police or intelligence agencies.48 Marwan al-Shehhi fell into conversation that spring with a Hamburg librarian, Angela Duile, as he prepared to depart for America. “Something will happen and there will be thousands dead,” he told her. He mentioned the World Trade Center, she recalled. She did not think he was serious.

THE CIA’S THREAT reporting about bin Laden surged that spring to levels the Counterterrorist Center had rarely seen. Tenet thought the threat intelligence from intercepts and human agents was as frightening as he had ever witnessed. Cofer Black said later that he became convinced in the spring that al Qaeda was about to strike hard. He could not tell where, but it seemed to him that the Arabian peninsula and Israel were the most likely targets.

Thiel’s loathing for government spending did not apply when the government spent money on him. His next big startup, Palantir—a name borrowed from Tolkien—depended for survival upon the least transparent, least accountable, and most profligate extension of the federal government, the CIA. The agency invested in Thiel through its Silicon Valley VC front, In-Q-Tel. With Palantir, this self-described “civil libertarian” became an important player in the growth of a secretive, invasive, and patently unconstitutional global surveillance apparatus. Asked in a 2014 online chat if Palantir was “a front for the CIA,” Thiel replied, “No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.” With 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to the private sector, this dismissive wisecrack was not so much an outright denial as it was a sly wink at the extent of corporate dominance over even the most powerful federal agencies.

The FBI issued 216 secret, internal threat warnings between January 1 and September 10, 2001, of which 6 mentioned possible attacks against airports or airlines. The State Department issued 9 separate warnings during the same period to embassies and citizens abroad, including 5 that highlighted a general threat to Americans all over the world. The Federal Aviation Administration issued 15 notices of possible terrorist threats against American airlines.19

The Taliban’s “extreme actions now have cracked the Pashtuns,” Massoud told her. “An average Pashtun mullah is asking—he knows the history and simply has a question: Why are there no schools? Why is there no education for women? Why are women not allowed to work?” The Taliban’s religious tenets had been imported from Pakistan and applied inflexibly, Massoud said. Traditional Afghan religious leaders at the village level had now begun to challenge these decrees.8

The Saudi royals were embarrassed by complaints about bin Laden and angry about his antiroyal agitation. Yet Prince Turki and other senior Saudi princes had trouble believing that bin Laden was much of a threat to anyone. They saw him as a misguided rich kid, the black sheep of a prestigious family, a self-important and immature man who would likely be persuaded as he aged to find some sort of peaceful accommodation with his homeland. But bin Laden was stubborn.

The CIA prepared a briefing paper on July 10 for senior Bush administration officials: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”24

That August and for six months to come, as he became only the second president in American history to face impeachment charges, Clinton had neither the credibility nor the political strength required to lead the United States into a sustained military conflict even if it was an unconventional or low-grade war fought by Special Forces. His realistic options were severely limited. And Clinton could be certain that he would be harshly criticized no matter what he did or did not do.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.

al Qaeda is prepared to mount one or more terrorist attacks at any time.” There were some reports that the attack was aimed at U.S. soil. An intelligence alert in early June said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was recruiting volunteers to undertake missions in the United States, where they would “establish contact with colleagues already living there.” In July the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center reported that it had interviewed a source who had recently returned from Afghanistan. The source had reported, “Everyone is talking about an impending attack.”23

BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S. was the headline on the President’s Daily Brief presented to Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch on August 6. The report addressed questions Bush had asked about domestic threats and included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur. Tenet said the intelligence indicated that al Qaeda might have delayed a major attack.30

Over the years Tomsen had concluded that America’s failed policies in Afghanistan flowed in part from the compartmented, top secret isolation in which the CIA always sought to work. The agency saw the president as its client. By keeping the State Department and other policy makers at a distance, it preserved a certain freedom to operate. But when the agency was wrong—the Bay of Pigs, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—there was little check on its analysis. Conversely, when it was on the right track—as with Massoud in the late 1990s—it often had trouble finding allies in political Washington.11

During his first months in office Clinton did not think of Afghanistan as a major base for international terrorism, he told colleagues years later. He was more seriously concerned about state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iraq and Iran, and about Shiite groups such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, which had killed dozens of Americans during the 1980s. Clinton knew nothing of bin Laden during the first few years of his presidency. As for Afghanistan’s war, the issue languished mainly from inertia, Lake said later; it had not been a major issue in the late Bush administration, either.3

executives at America’s largest energy companies began late in 1995 to imagine the future by studying historical maps. Across Afghanistan travelers along the Silk Road had created fortunes for centuries by moving spice, jewels, and textiles to new markets. The profitable game now—created by the Soviet Union’s collapse—was oil and natural gas. The key trade routes were the same as they had been for centuries. Many led through Afghanistan. Robin Raphel and others at the State Department and the White House believed that for American oil companies, too, the Taliban could be an important part of a new Afghan solution.

Bin Laden practiced intensive operational security. He was wary of telephones. He allowed no Afghans into his personal bodyguard, only Arabs he had known and trusted for many years. He varied his routes, did not stay in any one place for long, and never told anyone but his Arab inner circle about his plans. These practices limited the effectiveness of the CIA’s recruitments because the agency’s sources and paid agents were mainly Afghans who were kept at bay by bin Laden’s core bodyguard and leadership group. The CIA was unable to penetrate the inner circle, but bin Laden did have one security weakness, as agency operatives saw it: his several wives.

Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the entrance to the river, was taken over by the Navy and became full of secretive Naval officers; it became known that this was part of a mysterious Navel entity called 'Force J'. Near Lepe House and at the very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the river where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let their ramps down to embark the vehicles and tanks. This place was about two miles from 'Mastodon'. A mile or so along the coast a country house was occupied by a secret Naval party who did strange things with tugs and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of cotton floating in the sea; this was 'Pluto', Pipe Line Under The Ocean, which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as 'Phoenix', one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the artificial harbour 'Mulberry' on the north coast of France.

Is there a bird among them, dear boy?” Charity asked innocently, peering not at the things on the desk, but at his face, noting the muscle beginning to twitch at Ian’s tense jaw. “No.” “Then they must be in the schoolroom! Of course,” she said cheerfully, “that’s it. How like me, Hortense would say, to have made such a silly mistake.” Ian dragged his eyes from the proof that his grandfather had been keeping track of him almost from the day of his birth-certainly from the day when he was able to leave the cottage on his own two legs-to her face and said mockingly, “Hortense isn’t very perceptive. I would say you are as wily as a fox.” She gave him a little knowing smile and pressed her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell her, will you? She does so enjoy thinking she is the clever one.” “How did he manage to have these drawn?” Ian asked, stopping her as she turned away. “A woman in the village near your home drew many of them. Later he hired an artist when he knew you were going to be somewhere at a specific time. I’ll just leave you here where it’s nice and quiet.” She was leaving him, Ian knew, to look through the items on the desk. For a long moment he hesitated, and then he slowly sat down in the chair, looking over the confidential reports on himself. They were all written by one Mr. Edgard Norwich, and as Ian began scanning the thick stack of pages, his anger at his grandfather for this outrageous invasion of his privacy slowly became amusement. For one thing, nearly every letter from the investigator began with phrases that made it clear the duke had chastised him for not reporting in enough detail. The top letter began, I apologize, Your Grace, for my unintentional laxness in failing to mention that indeed Mr. Thornton enjoys an occasional cheroot… The next one opened with, I did not realize, Your Grace, that you would wish to know how fast his horse ran in the race-in addition to knowing that he won. From the creases and holds in the hundreds of reports it was obvious to Ian that they’d been handled and read repeatedly, and it was equally obvious from some of the investigator’s casual comments that his grandfather had apparently expressed his personal pride to him: You will be pleased to know, Your Grace, that young Ian is a fine whip, just as you expected… I quite agree with you, as do many others, that Mr. Thornton is undoubtedly a genius… I assure you, Your Grace, that your concern over that duel is unfounded. It was a flesh wound in the arm, nothing more. Ian flipped through them at random, unaware that the barricade he’d erected against his grandfather was beginning to crack very slightly. “Your Grace,” the investigator had written in a rare fit of exasperation when Ian was eleven, “the suggestion that I should be able to find a physician who might secretly look at young Ian’s sore throat is beyond all bounds of reason. Even if I could find one who was willing to pretend to be a lost traveler, I really cannot see how he could contrive to have a peek at the boy’s throat without causing suspicion!” The minutes became an hour, and Ian’s disbelief increased as he scanned the entire history of his life, from his achievements to his peccadilloes. His gambling gains and losses appeared regularly; each ship he added to his fleet had been described, and sketches forwarded separately; his financial progress had been reported in minute and glowing detail.

CIA and FBI officers dug back through the surveillance images and cables generated in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. For the first time he saw that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had been photographed and tracked during that operation, had unrestricted visa access to the United States, had probably entered the country, and might still be resident. Yet neither man had ever been placed on a watch list. The CIA apparently did not formally notify the FBI about this alarming discovery. Only the New York field office received a routine request to search for Mihdhar. Investigators later could find no evidence that anyone briefed Clarke, Bush’s cabinet, or the president about the missing suspects.33

Clinton put it later. Yet at the same time “you cannot collapse walls, collapse differences, and spread information without making yourself more vulnerable to forces of destruction.” Clinton believed that America’s mission was to accelerate these trends, not resist them. He sought to lead the country and the world from a period of global “interdependence” to one of more complete worldwide “integration.” Terrorist attacks were a “painful and powerful example of the fact that we live in an interdependent world that is not yet an integrated global community,” he believed. Yet Clinton did not want to build walls. He saw the reactionary forces of terrorism, nationalism, and fundamentalism as inevitable; they were intricately connected to the sources of global progress. They were also doomed. In human history, he asserted with questionable accuracy, “no terrorist campaign has ever succeeded.”31

CIA analysis began by late 1994 to run in a different direction. The insights Black and his case officers could obtain into bin Laden’s inner circle were limited, but they knew that bin Laden was working closely with the Sudanese intelligence services. They knew that Sudanese intelligence, in turn, was running paramilitary and terrorist operations in Egypt and elsewhere. Bin Laden had access to Sudanese military radios, weapons, and about two hundred Sudanese passports. These passports supplemented the false documents that bin Laden acquired for his aides from the travel papers of Arab volunteers who had been killed in the Afghan jihad. Working with liaison intelligence services across North Africa, Black and his Khartoum case officers tracked bin Laden to three training camps in northern Sudan. They learned that bin Laden funded the camps and used them to house violent Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian, and Palestinian jihadists. Increasingly the Khartoum station cabled evidence to Langley that bin Laden had developed the beginnings of a multinational private army. He was a threat.

MASSOUD DISPATCHED his foreign policy adviser, Abdullah, to Washington in August. Their Northern Alliance lobbyist, Otilie English, scratched together a few appointments on Capitol Hill. It was difficult to get anyone’s attention. They had to compete with Pakistan’s well-heeled, high-paid professional lobbyists and advocates, such as the former congressman Charlie Wilson, who had raised so much money for Pakistan’s government in Congress during the anti-Soviet jihad. Abdullah and English tried to link their lobbying effort with Hamid Karzai and his brother, Qayum, to show that Massoud was fighting the Taliban with multiethnic allies. But the members they met with could barely manage politeness. Guns or financial aid were out of the question. Some barely knew who Osama bin Laden was. With the Democrats they tried to press the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan, but even that seemed to be a dying cause now that the Clintons were gone. Both Massoud’s group and the Karzais were “so disappointed, so demoralized” after a week of meetings on the Hill and at the State Department, Karzai’s lobbyist recalled.37