Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America--and How the CIA Has Ignored It

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 - What You Need to Know

Chapter 2 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 3 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 4 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 5 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 6 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 7 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 8 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 9 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 10 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 11 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 12 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 13 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 14 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 15 - ALI REPORTS

Chapter 16 - ALI REPORT

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Appendix One - Recent Letter from Ali

Appendix Two - Memo: Ali a Credible Source

Appendix Three - Letter of April 28, 2003

Appendix Four - Letter to CIA Director George Tenet April 14, 2004

Appendix Five - Letter to John Hamre Deputy Secretary of Defense on National ...

Appendix Six - U.S.—Russia Partnership

INDEX

Copyright Page

DEDICATION

To AMERICA’S HEROES in fire departments, emergency rescue services, and the police—our domestic defenders; to our military personnel—our international defenders; to the unsung heroes in the intelligence community—the whistleblowers, dissidents, reformers, and free thinkers; and to America’s families—in the hope that they will live in a better, safer world—this book is dedicated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO MY WIFE, MY FAMILY, and to all who made this book possible, including Peter Pry, my longtime colleague, friend, and veteran of the CIA, who was invaluable in helping me prepare this manuscript, and to my colleagues and traveling partners Solomon Ortiz, Sylvester Reyes, Roscoe Bartlett, Doug Roach, Russ Caso, Jim Woolsey, Jack Caravelli, and all of those who have believed and encouraged the continuation of the fight for the defense of our nation and our ideals.

1

What You Need to Know

THIS BOOK IS AN ACT OF DESPERATION. I bring it before you, the reader, because I could not get our intelligence community to act on it, though my source has proven his credibility, and though the information he provides predicts a major terrorist attack against the United States.

If the intelligence divulged in this book had been collected by the intelligence community, it would be classified at the highest security level, above TOP SECRET, and would never be seen by the public. I can share this information with you only because it was collected by me, not by the intelligence community. Never before has such real time, war-related intelligence, from an impeccable clandestine source, been publicly disclosed.

Like all Americans, September 11 is forever seared into my memory. Flames of orange and black exploded from the World Trade Center buildings as airliners struck them like spears. Strangers who hurled themselves into the air and plunged to their deaths to escape the agony of the flames were suddenly as dear to us as brothers and sisters.

Moments earlier, I was speaking at a congressional press conference on national security. My good friends and Democratic colleagues Congressmen Solomon Ortiz and Silvestre Reyes were there. We stood in the Capitol building transfixed by the tragedy unfolding irresistibly before us on the television screen. Now our differences were forgotten, as all of us stood united in horror, pity, anger, and terrible resolve. When the towers crumbled into dust, the shock among us was palpable, as if every person in that crowd was struck a blow. At that moment, I remembered J. Robert Oppenheimer describing what he thought when he witnessed the explosion of the first atomic bomb. It was a line from the Hindu Bhagavada-Gita, I am become death: the destroyer of worlds.

On that terrible day in September, little did I know that I too would soon find myself on the front line in the war on terror, enmeshed in an international intrigue of spies and killers. I was to learn of plots to assassinate world figures—including a former U.S. president—and of a plot to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans by radiation poisoning. I would discover a still more audacious plot, now unfolding, to inflict a terrorist attack on the United States of such catastrophic dimensions that the code name of the attack evokes Shiite Islam’s prophet of doom, the twelfth imam, Imam al Mahdi, "Ya Mahdi, Ad Rekni! (Mahdi save us!"). The twelfth imam miraculously vanished some eleven centuries ago. He is expected to return and fulfill the long-awaited Islamic apocalypse, one that will reward the faithful and, with catastrophic violence, purge all infidels from the face of the Earth.

Fantastic as it might seem, our intelligence community is failing to protect us from this attack, a failure greater than that surrounding September 11. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA)—indeed all of the agencies of the intelligence community—are failing to do what is necessary to prevent the twelfth imam operation.

I am vice chairman of the House Armed Service Committee in Congress and knew before September 11 that our intelligence services were in dire straits. For eight years, the Clinton administration slashed deeply the defense and intelligence budgets, cutting funding for the intelligence community by more then 30 percent. It also pressured the intelligence community to produce politically correct intelligence that would serve the needs of administration policy.

This was only the latest blow to the intelligence community. It suffered for decades, and continues to suffer, from serious problems, including an overreliance on technical rather than human intelligence, and a tendency towards politically correct group think. The result has been a string of intelligence failures.

The Bush administration is working hard to fix our intelligence community. But the fact is that all the efforts of the administration, and Congress, to repair our intelligence posture have failed—at least so far. This was made manifest to me by the stubborn refusal of the intelligence community to do its job and to follow up on the intelligence we have on the 12th Imam plot. It is a refusal that amounts to a dereliction of duty.

As a senior member of Congress responsible for overseeing our nation’s defense, I have many people coming to me claiming to know secrets vital to U.S. national security. I do not ignore any of them. All of these people are scrutinized, either by myself, my staff, or by the appropriate federal agencies, which check their bona fides to see if they are credible and have anything valuable to offer.

The vast majority of these meetings with potential intelligence sources prove fruitless. In one case, I met a member of the Mafia who claimed to have a scheme that he thought would help the United States capture major terrorists. I turned his case over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who found that he was trying to exploit the war on terrorism in order to work a criminal scam. So I have a healthy skepticism about potential sources.

So it was with low expectations—but enough that I thought I should follow up—that I traveled to Paris in April 2003 to meet a man named Ali. Ali is the pseudonym for an individual whose information forms the heart of this book, information that he has collected from sources deep within the high command of the terrorist movement. Ali’s real name and details cannot be disclosed. I learned of him through unusual channels. On March 7, 2003, at 4:14 p.m., a former Democratic member of Congress and my good friend Ron Klink called and asked to meet with me. His message was that he wished to convey sensitive and urgent information, which he had received from a former CIA operative regarding the location of bin Laden, in addition to other data regarding Iran, derived from a well-connected source. I met with Ron and he outlined the opportunity that we had to obtain more information from this source, which was vital to America’s security.

The source was Ali. My contacts with him were at first by telephone. Subsequently, Ali sent faxes to my home on a regular basis from different hotels in Paris, where he lives in exile. Eventually, as the information became more detailed and critical, I decided on a face-to-face meeting. Accompanying me was Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, a trusted adviser and former CIA intelligence officer for ten years.

Ali’s background and connections were very impressive and appeared to support his credibility. This much can be told safely, without risking anyone’s life: Ali was a former high-ranking member in the government of the shah of Iran. Since the fall of the shah over two decades ago, Ali has been associated with the movement seeking to overthrow the revolutionary government of Iran and its theocratic mullahs. Ali is a close and trusted associate of Manucher Gorbanifar, a controversial figure who played a key role working for the United States during the Iran-Contra affair, and who has been blamed, perhaps wrongly, by the CIA for the failure of the Iran-Contra operation. Although Ali knows Gorbanifar, it is clear that he is independent of him.

Subsequent meetings and encounters with Ali have not shaken my belief in his credibility. Ali himself is knowledgeable and erudite. His personal circumstances, which I am not at liberty to divulge, make it highly unlikely that he would be acting for selfish or illegal reasons. Indeed, Ali’s personal circumstances make it likely that he is exactly what he appears to be: a true patriot who wishes to see an Iran that is democratic, civilized, and an adversary of global terrorism.

Although Ali’s credentials were impressive, Dr. Pry and I emerged from our first meeting nearly convinced that he was a fraud. Ali made fantastic claims about the advanced status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Iranian cooperation with North Korea on nuclear weapons, terrorist plans for attacks in Europe and the United States, Iranian plans to destabilize the situation in Iraq by supporting terrorism and clandestine operations there, and other extraordinary claims. Ali’s allegations were sharply at variance with unclassified estimates of the U.S. intelligence community. Ali’s views also disagreed with the common wisdom of the defense, academic, and press communities. Basically, if Ali was right, then everyone else was wrong.

For example, Ali told us that Iran’s atomic bomb program was very advanced and near completion, so near that they might soon perform a nuclear test. Yet at the time Ali spoke to us, unclassified intelligence community estimates and common wisdom held that Iran’s atomic program was still in its infancy. Ali told us that Iran was seeking cooperation with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program. He said Iran even attempted to buy an atomic bomb from North Korea. No one in the West—or the East—was reporting such alarming developments. Ali said that Iran was the primary supporter of insurgents in Iraq, while everyone else was saying that Syria was the culprit. Ali said that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Iran, an honored guest. But the U.S. military was then and still is searching for bin Laden in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Later, Ali told us that there was a terrorist plot to hijack a Canadian airliner and fly it into a nuclear reactor in the United States. Such an attack could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans through radiation poisoning. All of this sounded so incredible that Dr. Pry and I left that first meeting with Ali just shaking our heads.

Yet as the weeks and months passed, Ali’s predictions and his version of events either came true or were independently verified, often becoming the stuff of newspaper headlines. Indeed, the day after our first meeting with Ali, some unconfirmed press reports alleged that North Korea had announced that it reserved the right to sell nuclear weapons to other states. This was consistent with Ali’s claim that Iran was seeking to purchase an atomic bomb from North Korea. Later, a North Korean defector disclosed that Iranian delegations had in fact gone to North Korea seeking cooperation on their nuclear weapons programs and to buy an atomic bomb. A year and a half later, an unclassified CIA report confirmed that North Korea threatened secretly to sell nuclear weapons (in late April 2003) exactly when Ali had warned us of this threat. The story made headlines in the Washington Times (November 27, 2004).

Also in November 2004, U.S. News and World Report ran a cover story, allegedly based on classified intelligence reports, proving that Iran was the primary engine driving the insurgency in Iraq, just as Ali had told us in Paris. Ali’s information about the Iranian connection to Iraq predated by months the earliest classified intelligence cited by U.S. News and World Report. And again in November 2004, CIA analysts publicly observed that the clerical robes worn by Osama bin Laden in a video message suggested that he might be hiding among a religious order located in Iran. Perhaps most remarkably, in August 2003, a terrorist cell was arrested in Canada, apparently plotting to fly a hijacked airliner into a nuclear reactor in the United States, again as Ali had warned.

Many other predictions of Ali turned out to be true. As time passed and Ali’s many allegations were uncanny in their accuracy, he built for me an impressive track record. As the reader will find in the documents that follow, the course of world events have established incontrovertibly that All is a highly credible source of reliable intelligence on Iranian and other terrorist activities.

Before events proved All to be an excellent resource in the war on terrorism, I provided all of his information to the intelligence community, and asked them to evaluate him. Ali’s impressive background and connections alone warranted further investigation of his extraordinary claims. We just could not risk another major intelligence failure that might lead to a repeat of September 11, perhaps on a far more destructive scale.

Because of the nature of Ali’s claims, I believed it important that I meet personally with George Tenet, then director of the CIA. I asked Tenet to have the CIA meet with Ali, evaluate him, and work with him if the agency judged he might be useful. Because of Ali’s background and connections, I assumed the CIA would employ him. The CIA routinely places people on its payroll whose credentials are far less impressive than Ali’s.

Tenet appeared interested, even enthusiastic, about evaluating Ali and establishing a working relationship with him. He agreed to send his top spy, Stephen Kappes, the deputy director of operations, along with me to Paris for another debriefing of Ali. It was at this point that I entered the wilderness of mirrors. On the day of our scheduled second meeting with Ali in Paris, Kappes bowed out, claiming that other commitments compelled him to cancel. Given the high stakes in the war on terrorism, and the well-known fact that the CIA is desperately deficient in human intelligence sources—and that the meeting had been blessed by Kappes’s superior, Tenet—I found it hard to imagine what other commitments could have possibly been more compelling. Later, the CIA claimed to have met with Ali independently. But I discovered this to be untrue. The CIA admitted this, with no explanation as to why they would lie to me about the meeting.

Incredibly, I learned that the CIA had apparently asked French intelligence to silence Ali. Ali had had no contact with