Thread by @nimkef

March 2004

Julie Sirrs, a former military analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, was the first intelligence officer to report on the significance of Osama bin Laden moving his terrorist operation from the Sudan into Afghanistan.

observer.com/2004/03/exspoo…

Dr. al-Zawahiri & bin Laden have been partners since 1993, when bin Laden merged Al Qaeda w/ al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad. They met when bin Laden was treated for low blood pressure by al-Zawahiri, who is credited w/ the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar al Sadat.

al-Zawahiri & bin Laden announced the launch of their “campaign of terror” in November 1997

It was one month earlier that Julie Sirrs, made her first investigative trip to Afghanistan. But at that time, she was an odd duck within the American intelligence establishment.

She graduated from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in 1992, the Soviets had been driven out of Afghanistan by the mujahedeen

Sirrs studied the languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Persian and Pashto. In September 1995, she was hired by the DIA as a military analyst

In 1996, when she found out bin Laden had left the Sudan and gone to Afghanistan, Sirrs thought she saw her chance to get an assignment to the country. But the only official visit available for a US government operative was a day trip from Pakistan

So, on her annual leave in Oct 1997, she dressed as an Afghan woman and slipped over the border from Pakistan. Traveling with relatives of her Pashto tutor, who were going to visit their family in Taliban-controlled territory, she was able to stay for a week outside of Kabul.

George Tenet sent a notice that fighting Al Qaeda was now the CIA’s top priority, but little attention was paid. President Bill Clinton, mired in the Lewinsky scandal, ordered missile strikes on 3 of bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, but the attacks missed

After that failure, Ms. Sirrs saw that the CIA wasn’t sending operatives into Afghanistan.

“That seemed ludicrous,” she said. “If I had been able to go in, as a woman, why couldn’t covert agents?”

The Afghan UN rep said that if Sirrs could make it to Uzbekistan, the Northern Alliance would help to get her into the territory they controlled. She saved up her vacation days, notified the DIA security office of her plans, and received permission to go on her own

The only obstacle, as she saw it, was her husband. Owen Sirrs also worked for the DIA, and though he feared for her safety, she resolved to take off, alone, on an Uzbek Airways flight in Oct 1998. She drove through the former Soviet republic Tajikistan recovering from a civil war

The only way to get into Afghanistan was on a leftover Soviet MI-17 helicopter, literally held together with duct tape. She was the only passenger. She watched while the pilot sat astride the engine, pumping in fuel as he nonchalantly smoked a cigarette.

Landing in the Panjshir Valley, she was relieved to be told that she would be able to meet with Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary military commander of the Northern Alliance. Massoud and his ragtag coalition of Afghan fighters were at war with the Taliban.

“The Northern Alliance was a significant force that was engaged on the ground against Al Qaeda–sponsored fighters”, Mrs. Sirrs learned. “But it was discounted by the U.S. policy-making establishment.

“Taliban regime was funded by bin Laden & the drug trade, while the resistance was surviving on a shoestring. With even a little aid to the Afghan resistance, we could have pushed the Taliban out of power. But there was great reluctance by the State Dept & CIA to undertake that”

Unocal had courted Taliban to build a massive pipeline across Afghanistan that would connect the oil & nat-gas of Turkmenistan to ports in Pakistan. Unocal partnered w/ Delta Oil (Saudi) & promised the Taliban it could expect up to $100M in transit fees from the $4.5B project.

“Massoud told me he had proof that Unocal had provided money that helped the Taliban take Kabul,” Sirrs said. Among Afghans, this was popularly believed.

[
4 Jan 1998

he Taleban authorities have strongly indicated that they're close to reaching a final agreement on the building of a gas pipeline across Afghanistan.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/wes…

No indication of which of 2 competing companies the Taleban favoured, Bridas of Argentine or UNOCAL of the US

The project involves constructing at least one pipeline which would carry Turkmen gas across Afghanistan to Pakistan

The BBC correspondent in Kabul says the project will be the first major foreign investment in Afghanistan since the outbreak of war nearly twenty years ago; it will also help break the stranglehold that Russia maintained over Central Asian oil and gas export routes.

]

It didn’t take much imagination: State Department officials openly promoted the pipeline, and Unocal brazenly hired former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as consultant. He would later be President Bush’s first choice to head the supposedly independent 9/11 comission.

After two weeks, Sirrs couldn’t wait to get back to her job to share her new maps, photos & interviews, and to give briefings on Afghanistan. When she arrived at Reagan National Airport, an agent from the security office of the DIA demanded she hand over all of her films & tapes

When she tried to go into her office the next day, a Saturday, to type up her notes, she was barred from the building and had her badge confiscated.

“She had gotten the proper clearances to go, and she came back with valuable info,” said a senior colleague, “but her trip had caused a serious row involving several government agencies. The undersecretary of state & CIA had been exchanging high-level messages.

They were so intent on getting rid of her, the last thing they wanted to pay attention to was any information she had. Everybody was quick to turn on her.”

She was accused of espionage by the FBI and called in for a five-hour polygraph test.

Simultaneously, her husband, also a DIA professional, was given his own lie-detector test. Both passed. Ms. Sirrs showed the FBI the written permission given to her by the DIA for personal travel to Afghanistan and demonstrated that she was only too willing to cooperate.

FBI wrapped up its investigation & Ms. Sirrs hoped any misunderstanding had been cleared up.

But the nightmare didn’t go away.

“The DIA gave me a list of charges, including going against the wishes of my husband. The charges tried to make me look like Mata Hari, having a crush on the Afghan resistance fighters-it was extremely insulting. They were playing like the Taliban.”

Ms. Sirrs said she believed that her information was discounted because it was damaging to the Taliban.

“The State Department didn’t want to have anything to do with Afghan resistance, or even, politically, to reveal that there was any viable option to the Taliban,” she said.

At the operational level of the CIA, there were agents who argued that they needed operatives down around the campfire with Massoud’s men. But higher-level officials, both at the CIA and the State Department, were vehemently opposed.

The senior colleague verified that the State Department was furious that Ms. Sirrs had showed up as a private citizen with her own entrée to Massoud and the resistance forces.

“The State Department called the director of DIA, repeatedly, demanding her ‘execution,’” the colleague said, echoing the agency parlance for firing.

A month after her return, Julie Sirrs’ security clearance was revoked.

Even after hiring a lawyer and struggling for a year to regain her security status within the agency, Ms. Sirrs remained out in the cold. She left the D.I.A. in the fall of 1999.

Even after she left the agency, Julie Sirrs continued to follow the Afghan resistance movement. She made two more trips to the country, in 1999 and shortly after the terrorist bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000.

Still, the C.I.A. wasn’t interviewing the Northern Alliance’s Al Qaeda prisoners.

Sirrs tried to drive home the idea that not only was Mr. bin Laden building a terrorist network in Afghanistan, but also that Dr. al-Zawahiri was there, along with Saudi militants and other groups.

“All of these people we really needed to be worried about were right there in Afghanistan, being given safe haven by the Taliban,” she said.

Ms. Sirrs is only faintly encouraged by the efforts of the independent commission looking into the failures that led up to 9/11.

“I don’t get the sense they’re really interested in getting to the heart of the policy problems,” she said.

Sirrs would like to testify before the 9/11 commission. She has sent her biography and written reports to the commission’s investigators. She has never heard back.

In the commission’s next public hearing, 23-24 March 2004, among the key witnesses will be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The commission already knows that the Bush administration began to negotiate with the Taliban shortly after taking power in January 2001. The Taliban even hired a niece of former C.I.A. director Richard Helms, Laila Helms, as its public-relations face in Washington.

The last meeting between the U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in Afghanistan five weeks before the 9/11 attacks.

8 Sept 2001, two men claiming to be journalists came to interview Massoud. The camera they pointed at the Northern Alliance leader was actually a bomb, which blew a hole in Massoud’s chest. Two hours later, the CIA identified the assassins as Al Qaeda members.

Sirrs herself was supposed to be in the Pentagon on 9/11, invited by her former colleagues to help analyze the Afghan resistance after Massoud’s assassination. Her new daughter was 9 months old.

Even after 9/11, a State Department official said it was “premature” to “[hatch] plots with the Northern Alliance.”

I wonder if they took the same route

https://twitter.com/nimkef/status/1426057755274719234?s=20