The after-action review had treated the CIA as the lead agency for any offen-
sive 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.
they reckoned that the millennium alert had already used up all of the Cen-
ter'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 coun-
terterrorism just two days after the principals' meeting.
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 after-
math of the millennium alert,Tenet wanted a boost in overall funds for the CIA
and another supplemental appropriation specifically for counterterrorism.
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."
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]."
the figures he used to argue that CIA spending on counterterrorism from its
baseline budget had shown almost no increase.
2001 budget priorities and offsets for the CIA and other agencies. In the end,