The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [167]
There was debate at the meeting, but no decision, about use of the Predator, the unmanned drone that had long since proven capable of stunningly clear air-to-ground photography. Prolonged experiment—a model of a house bin Laden was known to frequent was used for target practice—had established that the Predator could be transformed into a pinpoint-accurate, missile-bearing weapon. Were the drone to get bin Laden in its sights, as it had as long ago as fall 2000, there was every likelihood he could be killed almost instantly.
At the September 4 meeting, though, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Myers and CIA director Tenet merely dueled over whether handling the Predator should be the mission of the military or of the CIA. “I just couldn’t believe it,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke remembered. “This is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of the CIA sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden.” Their argument, apparently, was primarily about which agency was to foot the bill for operating the Predators. All that was resolved was that the CIA should consider using the Predator again for reconnaissance purposes.
As for the directive as a whole, Clarke came away from the meeting as frustrated as ever. All the things he had recommended back in January 2001, he was to tell the Commission, were to get done—after 9/11. “I didn’t really understand,” he said, “why they couldn’t have been done in February.”
Clarke had been trying in vain, his aide Paul Kurtz recalled, to get Bush officials to “grasp the enormity of this new, transnational, networked foe … people thought he was hyping it up.” “It sounds terrible,” Clarke’s then-deputy Roger Cressey recalled, “but we used to say to each other that some people didn’t get it—it was going to take body bags.”
Hours before the September 4 meeting, Clarke had sent National Security Adviser Rice a strongly worded note, with several passages underlined. The real question before the participants that day, he wrote, was: “Are we serious about dealing with the al Qaeda threat? … Is al Qaeda a big deal? … Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.… What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time … You are left waiting for the big attack, with lots of casualties.”
September 4 ended with the Presidential Directive approved subject to just a few final adjustments by the Deputies Committee. It would be ready for the president’s signature—soon.
A THOUSAND MILES to the south, Atta found time for a matter of financial integrity. He told Binalshibh on September 5 that he and his men had money left over. Since they would soon have no further need of it, it should be reimbursed. For the hijackers, FBI investigators were to conclude, not to have returned remaining funds would have been to die as thieves.
In dribs and drabs over the next few days, by Western Union, bank transfer, and express mail, the terrorist team arranged for some $36,000 to be sent to the accomplice in Dubai who had been handling funds. The entire 9/11 operation, the Commission was to calculate, cost al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden less than $500,000.
Across the world, accomplices and men with guilty knowledge were by now running for safety. The “brothers,” as Binalshibh put it later, “were dispersed.” He himself flew from Germany to Spain, was met by a Saudi who furnished him with a phony passport, then took off on an airborne marathon that took him via Greece, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt to Pakistan.
Soon after he arrived, Binalshibh would tell his interrogators, a messenger set off overland with a status report for the leadership in