Building New Capabilities: The CIA
The after-action review had treated the CIA as the lead agency for any offensive
against al Qaeda, and the principals, at their March 10 meeting, had endorsed
strengthening the CIA's capability for that role. To the CTC, that meant
proceeding with "the Plan," which it had put forward half a year
earlier-hiring and training more case officers and building up the capabilities
of foreign security services that provided intelligence via liaison. On
occasion, as in Jordan in December 1999, these liaison services took direct
action against al Qaeda cells.72
In the CTC and higher up, the CIA's managers believed that they desperately
needed funds just to continue their current counterterrorism effort, for they
reckoned that the millennium alert had already used up all of the Center's funds
for the current fiscal year; the Bin Ladin unit had spent 140 percent of its
allocation. Tenet told us he met with Berger to discuss funding for
counterterrorism just two days after the principals' meeting.73
While Clarke strongly favored giving the CIA more money for counterterrorism,
he differed sharply with the CIA's managers about where it should come from.
They insisted that the CIA had been shortchanged ever since the end of the Cold
War. Their ability to perform any mission, counterterrorism included, they
argued, depended on preserving what they had, restoring what they had lost since
the beginning of the 1990s, and building from there-with across-the-board
recruitment and training of new case officers, and the reopening of closed
stations. To finance the counterterrorism effort, Tenet had gone to
congressional leaders after the 1998 embassy bombings and persuaded them to give
the CIA a special supplemental appropriation. Now, in the aftermath of the
millennium alert, Tenet wanted a boost in overall funds for the CIA and
another supplemental appropriation specifically for counterterrorism.74
To Clarke, this seemed evidence that the CIA's leadership did not give
sufficient priority to the battle against Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. He told us
that James Pavitt, the head of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, "said
if there's going to be money spent on going after Bin Ladin, it should be given
to him. ...My view was that he had had a lot of money to do it and a long time
to do it, and I didn't want to put more good money after bad."75
The CIA had a very different attitude: Pavitt told us that while the CIA's Bin
Ladin unit did "extraordinary and commendable work," his chief of
station in London "was just as much part of the al Qaeda struggle as an
officer sitting in [the Bin Ladin unit]."76
The dispute had large managerial implications, for Clarke had found allies in
the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).They had supplied him with the figures
he used to argue that CIA spending on counterterrorism from its baseline budget
had shown almost no increase.77
Berger met twice with Tenet in April to try to resolve the dispute. The
Deputies Committee met later in the month to review fiscal year 2000 and 2001
budget priorities and offsets for the CIA and other agencies. In the end, Tenet
obtained a modest supplemental appropriation, which funded counterterrorism
without requiring much reprogramming of baseline funds. But the CIA still
believed that it remained underfunded for counterterrorism.78
