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COFER BLACK

Mr. Chairman, I am honored to be here. I appreciate your offer for me to speak from behind a screen in order to protect me. Nomally, I would have accepted. This hearing is more important. I do not want to be only a voice. The American people need to see my face. I want to look the American people in the eye.

"My experience with Bin Ladin goes back to my service in Khartoum, Sudan from 1993 to 1995. I will provide an overview of counter terrorist programs and address issues that you have raised in your letter of invitation to this hearing. While we collectively seek to ensure that flaws in our procedures are identified and corrected, I want to again thank you for your continued care in ensuring that we not educate our enemies.

We knew of Bin Ladin since his early days in Afghanistan. We had no relationship with him but we watched a 22 year old rich kid from a prominent Saudi family, change from frontline mujahedin fighter to a financier for road construction and hospitals. Then we watched him found something we learned was called al Qa'ida.

By the time bin Ladin arrived in the Sudan in 1991, we learned he had used his fortune to train hundreds of Arab veterans of the war in Afghanistan for a worldwide jihad. Bin Ladin was developing into a significant sponsor of Sunni extremism.

* In December 1992, bin Ladin financed Islamic extremists who attacked a hotel in Yemen housing US military personnel.

* In 1993, we learned that bin Ladin was channeling funds to Egyptian extremists.

* In 1994, al-Qa'ida was financing at least three terrorist training camps in northern Sudan.

From 1996 on, bin Ladin's threats against Americans increased dramatically.

In 1996 his allies issued a fatwa authorizing attacks against Western military targets on the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1998, just before the East Africa Embassy bombings, his clerics issued another fatwa stating that muslims have a religious obligation to kill military and civilian Americans worldwide.

Also in 1998, bin Ladin said that acquisition of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons was a religious obligation and that "How we would use them was up to us." We also knew from our reporting that he was actively trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

By 1998, we developed substantial intelligence about bin Ladin, Mullah Omar, other terrorist leaders and on their training camps. Our efforts to capture him and disrupt al-Qa'ida grew increasingly intense from 1998 to the present."

I want to digress for a moment from our focus on Bin Ladin. To fully understand the CIA's counterterrorism program, you need to appreciate its scope. During the early and mid 1990's, al-Qa'ida was not our principal counterterrorism target. Until September 11, Hizballah had killed more Americans than any terrorist group. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Shining Path in Peru, Abu Saayef in the Philippines, 17 November in Greece, were all threats to Americans or American interests. Personnel and financial resources, management attention, policymaker interest were spread among these groups.

After September 11, we jumped to a whole new level of effectiveness. We had the resources we needed to do the job. The proof of the value of those resources lies recognizable to the American people for example in the end of the Taliban regime, the end of al-Qa'ida's sanctuary in Afghanistan and in prison cells and graves around the world.

I know that we are on the right track today and as a result we are safer as a nation. "No Limits" aggressive, relentless, worldwide pursuit of any terrorist who threatens us is the only way to go and is the bottom line. What we have managed to achieve abroad has been due in large part to the extraordinary professionalism of our men and women in CTC and those CIA operatives overseas who do the risky, hard work of counterterrorism. Lastly, I was proud of them then, am now, and will be until I die.

www.fas.org...

Mujaheddin

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.

Washington's policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski's grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq's own ambitions to dominate the region. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the �Islamic revolution� that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in 1979).

Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West's distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury �freedom fighter�. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

After the mujaheddin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar's forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that city � killing at least 2000 civilians � until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.

Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the mujaheddin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world's single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.

In 1995, the former director of the CIA's operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: �Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets... There was a fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.�

Operation Cyclone

According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).

John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American �black Muslims� were taught �sabotage skills�.

The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained �bin Laden's operatives� in 1989.

These �operatives� were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar's forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army's elite Green Berets.

The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called �Operation Cyclone�.

In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujaheddin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services � MAK).

MAK was a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.

Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA's approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was �partly culpable� for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.

Osama's military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.

Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujaheddin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, �The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism � car bombing and so on � so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns ... Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.�

�What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?� Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Wall Street Journal declared: "The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they were crucial to secure the country as a prime trans-shipment route for the export of Central Asia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources."

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Tommy Franks, the commanding general of Central Command (CENTCOM), told us that the President was dissatisfied. The U.S. military, Franks said, did not have an off-the-shelf plan to eliminate the al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan. The existing Infinite Resolve options did not, in his view, amount to such a plan.44 All these diplomatic and military plans were reviewed over the weekend of September 15�16, as President Bush convened his war council at Camp David.45 Present wereVice President Cheney, Rice, Hadley, Powell,Armitage, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Mueller, Tenet, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Cofer Black, chief of the DCI's Counterterrorist Center. Tenet described a plan for collecting intelligence and mounting covert operations.He proposed inserting CIA teams into Afghanistan to work with Afghan warlords who would join the fight against al Qaeda.46 These CIA teams would act jointly with the military's Special Operations units. President Bush later praised this proposal, saying it had been a turning point in his thinking.

The pre-9/11 draft presidential directive on al Qaeda evolved into a new directive, National Security Presidential Directive 9, now titled "Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States."The directive would now extend to a global war on terrorism, not just on al Qaeda.

The United States would strive to eliminate all terrorist networks, dry up their financial support, and prevent them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The goal was the "elimination of terrorism as a threat to our way of life."58