Prime target

John McLaughlin served as Acting Director of the CIA from July to September 2004 and as Deputy Director from 2000 to 2004. During his career at the agency which spanned more than 30 years he served 11 CIA directors in various high-level positions. In 2010, McLaughlin was asked by the Obama administration to head a group of national security experts to examine intelligence challenges as a reaction to two terrorist plots in 2009 targeting the United States. McLaughlin is currently Distinguished Practitioner-in-Residence at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Deutsche Welle: You worked for the CIA for more than 30 years. When did you first hear of Osama bin Laden?

John McLaughlin: Personally I came upon bin Laden in the middle of the 1990s. In approximately 1996 we realized that bin Laden was an important financier of al Qaeda activities and terrorist activities. He was moving at that point from Sudan to Afghanistan and at that time I was preparing assessments for the US government and in our major assessment in 1997 we mentioned bin Laden as a potential threat to the United States. Then of course al Qaeda carried out the embassy bombings in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 and then of course there was 9/11.

The US had tried, but failed to get bin Laden before September 11, 2001. How did the hunt for bin Laden change after 9/11?

9/11 was such a shock to the United States that the hunt intensified significantly after 9/11. Prior to 9/11 he had carried out attacks, but they were attacks on US interests remote from the homeland, still taken very seriously by the Clinton administration, but there were many other problems that the United States was dealing with at that point. After the 9/11 attacks many more resources flowed to the intelligence community in terms of funding and people and we were able to dramatically increase the number of people working on this problem.

A key moment to catch bin Laden early on took place in the mountains of Tora Bora where high-level al Qaeda members fled after the US went into Afghanistan after 9/11. Why was bin Laden able to escape from the US troops and what was your reaction when you learned of it?

There is still a lot of controversy around what happened at Tora Bora. My own personal view with all due respect to everyone who has a take on this is the terrain in that part of Afghanistan is so rugged and the conditions were so difficult that we would have to put a massive number of American troops in there in order to markedly increase the prospects of capturing him. I was not involved in the decision to put people there or not put people there, so I don't know precisely what went on in the heads of military commanders, but I am not one who is as convinced as many people are that he could have been captured there.

Is the general impression correct that after Tora Bora, the US never again came as close to finding or killing bin Laden, until he was finally tracked down last year and killed in May?

I think the general impression is generally correct. There were reports of bin Laden's locations and vulnerability throughout the years from 2001 to 2011 and there were a number of times when we thought we had some good intelligence indicating his general location, not his precise location, that he was in. And we would look and look and not find him. And so gradually we eliminated areas that were under consideration. I think in that period of time even though the intensity of the hunt for bin Laden continued the focus was primarily on ripping up and destroying the network that supported bin Laden.

In other words, the view was we had to look for him, but if we can destroy the networks of communicators, logisticians, safe houses, fund raisers, financial donors who support him then we will not only weaken him and reduce the chances of a terrorist attack, but we will isolate him and make it easier to find him. And I think broadly speaking that's what happened.

In other words, I believe now that that was the right strategy. Had we just focused on finding bin Laden and nothing else we might have found bin Laden, but we still would have had a very strong and robust terrorist movement alive and well whereas I think this strategy has not only led to the capture of bin Laden, but to a much weaker al Qaeda.

Can you help us understand why it was so difficult for the US with its vast and sophisticated intelligence and military capabilities to locate the world's most notorious terrorist?

In my experience in the intelligence field, the most difficult thing to do is to find one person. Let's go back to the Cold War. In the Cold War our job in intelligence was to find very big things in the world. It was to locate deployed Soviet nuclear forces, submarines and bombers or a motorized rifle division on the German border. In the war on terror which has preoccupied us since 9/11 our job has been to locate very small things: A bomb in a suitcase or one person in a city of several million. This is very hard, particularly when that person is applying all the elements of stealth and so forth that an individual can employ.

To give you an example: In our own country there was a bombing at an Olympic event in Atlanta some years ago and it took American authorities approximately three or four years to find that individual in our country with complete transparency and control of the legal system and vast legal powers. Also there was an individual who killed CIA officers outside of our headquarters in 1993 and it took us four years to find that person in Pakistan and bring him to justice in the United States. The message here I think is not that it takes so long, but that we won't give up.

You spent a good deal of your time in the CIA unsuccessfully trying to track him down. How did you feel when you left the agency at the end of 2004?

I felt pretty good, because I think we had weakened al Qaeda considerably. Our goal was to ensure that there were no further attacks on the United States and there had not been any successful attacks on the United States since then. So we had achieved our major goal in that respect.

But naturally anyone is disappointed that you haven't captured the main terrorist, so sure everyone was very glad when this operation worked successfully and I think the comfort all of us take from it as many people have noted including the current leadership of the CIA, the effort capture or to kill him in this case was successful largely because of intelligence gathered over probably 15 years. In operations like this it is against that template, that blueprint that had been developed over a long period of time that individual clues began to make some sense. So I think we all felt a little bit part of the operation.

Last year, US intelligence at last caught the decisive break in catching bin Laden. You are of course not with the CIA anymore, but as you are still closely involved and informed in intelligence and security matters, can you give us your reading of what finally led the US to bin Laden?

We don't know enough and I don't know enough personally to give you a confident view of that. There could be a lot of factors and a lot remains classified. I think that there probably already has been a little too much information revealed about the operation in the wake of it. I think it was just the gathering of many clues over many years.

Someone once said that intelligence is a little bit like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the picture on the box. In other words you have all the pieces, but you don't have the picture of what they are supposed to look like when you put them together. And that's a little bit of what happened here. In other words, when we began this search we had a lot of pieces, but we didn't quite know how to put them together. Over time, the picture on the box comes into view as you get more and more information. So toward the end of the process when you get little clues you can fit that clue into a broader picture and it start's to become meaningful.

One of the enduring themes of intelligence is that you frequently when you get new information go back into your archives and look at old information that didn't mean anything to you and all of a sudden it comes into bold relief and has great meaning because that latest clue fits and makes it clear.

And I think it was a process like that that ultimately brought into view bin Laden's location. Now bear in mind that as people in the American administration have said, they were not absolutely 100 percent sure that he was there. They had a high confidence level based on really circumstantial information, but they did not have absolute confirmation that he was there. So I'm going to guess here personally and say that they had 75 or 80 percent confidence that he was there. But they didn't have absolute certainty.

When you deal with someone like bin Laden, trying to track him down and reading up and learning about his habits and everything he does or says, do you develop some sort of relationship over time with this person somehow or how can you describe the relation you have with this individual like bin Laden yourself?

Not so much me, because I would speculate more about the individuals who were what I would call the front-line analysts who were working on this.

But if I would speculate about those who were directly working on this every day all day long I would say that you develop - not affection, but you develop an intimacy with the target in a sense that you gather so much information that you feel you know the individual and you are lacking the final few pieces to really understand the person and to get inside that person's decision making calculus to understand where they are and what they are doing. I can tell you that people who work on this become quite - understandably and justifiably - obsessed with the target.

The attitude at CIA after 9/11 I would sum up in two words: anger and resolve. Anger that we had failed to detect the precise target that al Qaeda was planning. We had very good intelligence indicating that we are anticipating an attack. We didn't know where it would be.

And so part of our reaction was anger, the other part was resolve. That is absolute resolve to never let that happen again and to destroy this movement that had brought this about. So people who work on this become quite driven by the objective and the mission.

Interview: Michael Knigge
Editor: Rob Mudge