F-14 Tomcat Units of Operation Enduring Freedom

Response

Within hours of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon being hit, US intelligence services had identified Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group as the perpetrators of these atrocities. Aboard Carl Vinson, VF-213’s Intelligence Officer, Lt(jg) Nate Bailey, was monitoring signals traffic being picked up by the ship in the aftermath of the attacks;

‘I was sat in CVN-70’s Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC) when the airliners hit the twin towers. Soon after the attacks, I went over and spoke with the ship’s Intelligence Collection Manager, who had noticed that nearly every national intelligence collection asset available was shifting its priority to Afghanistan. Almost immediately the “requirements deck” focused on Afghanistan too, and it became clear that CVW-11’s focus for the rest of the deployment would be on this land-locked country as well.’

Although nowhere near as familiar a target as southern Iraq, Afghanistan was not a complete stranger to American air strikes, having been hit by Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) fired from warships of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet on 20 August 1998. This attack, authorised by President Bill Clinton, had targeted al-Qaeda’s Zhawar Kili Al-Badr base camp, training facility and support complex in the eastern mountains of Afghanistan following the bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 13 days earlier.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been monitoring the movements of Osama Bin Laden prior to the embassy attacks, and after the TLAMs had failed to get him, they started following the Saudi terrorist around Afghanistan, trying to work out ways to deliver a killer blow. The CIA’s small force of Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), based in neighbouring Uzbekistan, played a key role in tracking al-Qaeda during this period.

A plan to remove the ruling Taleban government from power in the country was also devised, although the question of Pakistani sovereignty restricting aircraft overflights from the Northern Arabian Sea posed a thorny problem that could not be solved at the time.

As Central Command (CENTCOM) staff officer Vice Admiral David Nichols told Rebecca Grant, author of Battle-Tested – Carrier Aviation in Afghanistan and Iraq, when interviewed in 2004;

‘There was plenty of political will on the part of the Clinton administration to get Osama, but there was not much appetite for political and diplomatic risk, and changing the way we did business in that part of the world.’

Emboldened by the success of the embassy bombings, al-Qaeda struck again on 12 October 2000 when a small boat packed with explosives was detonated by its crew while alongside the destroyer USS Cole (DDG-67). The vessel was being refuelled in the Yemeni port of Aden at the time, and 17 sailors lost their lives. The US government again came close to ordering a TLAM strike in retaliation, but the CIA urged President Clinton to call it off at the last minute because Osama Bin Laden’s precise location was unknown at the time. A large-scale bombing campaign of all known terrorists’ camps and a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan were also contemplated, but neither were deemed to be ‘feasible without a finding of al-Qaeda responsibility for the Cole’, concluded President Clinton in his autobiography, My Life.

It did not take long for al-Qaeda to be directly linked to the 11 September 2001 attacks, however. Just hours after the towers had come down, a Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington, D.C. had been told about electronic intercepts that revealed representatives affiliated with Osama Bin Laden reporting that they had hit two targets. And three weeks prior to the attack, Bin Laden had told a London-based Arabic magazine of a pending ‘unprecedented attack, a very big one’ against American interests.