When Michael Morrell flew back to Washington, D.C., in Air Force One on Sept. 11, 2001, surrounded by two F-16 planes so close that he could see the pilots’ faces, he also saw the Pentagon, still burning from the day’s earlier destruction, and he cried.
Earlier that day, President George W. Bush had pulled Morrell, then his intelligence briefer, aside at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., and asked him who had orchestrated the hijacking of the four commercial planes that crashed that morning, killing nearly 3,000 people.
During a speech Wednesday night at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, Morrell, also the ex-CIA deputy director, recalled telling the president he would bet his children’s futures that Osama bin Laden had done it.
Even as the day’s intensity and surreality was wearing on him, Morrell said, “I had no doubt it was Osama bin Laden.”
Morrell still warns of threats from al-Qaida and told the Clinton School audience that no era in U.S. history has faced more threats to national security than the current one. He said intelligence collection and analysis is at the heart of addressing those threats.
The CIA has a sign that says “Today is September 12, 2001,” and Morrell said he lives by those words, warning that people in the United States are not as serious about national security as they were shortly after the 9/11 attacks. He cited public frustration with Transportation Security Administration regulations on flights and anger over the revelation of the National Security Agency’s collection of data worldwide as examples of people losing touch with the events of nearly 13 years ago.
“We’re still at war [with al-Qaida],” Morrell said. He added that the U.S. has succeeded in taking down top leaders of the organization but that al-Qaida has spread into numerous countries in north and east Africa, as well as Syria.
“Their great victory is the spread of ideology,” Morrell said.
He said he worries that a divided Syria could make it a haven for plotters of terrorist attacks, although he thinks al-Qaida is currently too spread out to orchestrate a huge attack like 9/11. Al-Qaida in Pakistan and Yemen are capable of single attacks, such as the taking down of an aircraft, he said.
After 9/11, he said, CIA workers labored around the clock, some not leaving their offices for days in a row, to solve the puzzle they hadn’t finished by Sept. 10 and to find bin Laden.
“It was hard, painstaking work,” he said.
Morrell, who is currently the senior security correspondent for CBS News, described what the CIA does as trying to solve a 1,000-piece puzzle without a picture on the box and with 5,000 pieces that don’t include all of the relevant ones.
The agency developed hundreds of leads after the 9/11 attacks and focused on a courier for bin Laden going by the fake name of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Five years passed before the agency discovered his real name.
More time passed before they learned al-Kuwaiti was going to a compound to see bin Laden, and even more time passed before agents discovered where it was in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Al-Kuwaiti and his brother were using aliases, lying to their families about where they lived and only turned on their cellphones when they were far away from Abbottabad, Morrell said.
Eventually, President Barack Obama gave the go-ahead to invade the compound. Navy SEALs found bin Laden and killed him.
Morrell said he walked outside after the news broke and heard students chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!” in Lafayette Park.
“I have never been prouder of my officers than at that moment,” he said.
Audience members dabbed their eyes listening to Morrell’s story and stood up to clap when he was done.
“We’ve had a lot of programs at the Clinton School,” said Dean Skip Rutherford. “This maybe was the best.”
Arkansas, Pages 10 on 04/24/2014