Bin Laden Issue Station - Conception, Birth and Growth

Conception, Birth and Growth

The idea was born from discussions within the CIA's senior management, and that of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center (CTC). David Cohen, head of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, and others, wanted to try out a virtual station, modeled on the Agency's overseas stations, but based near Washington DC and dedicated to a particular issue. The unit "would fuse intelligence disciplines into one office—operations, analysis, signals intercepts, overhead photography and so on".

Cohen had trouble getting any Directorate of Operations officer to run the unit. He finally recruited Michael Scheuer, an analyst then running the CTC's Islamic Extremist Branch; Scheuer "was especially knowledgeable about Afghanistan". Scheuer, who "had noticed a recent stream of reports about Bin Ladin and something called al Qaeda", suggested that the new unit "focus on this one individual". Cohen agreed.

The Station opened in January 1996, as a unit under the CTC. Scheuer set it up and headed it from that time until spring 1999. The Station was an interdisciplinary group, drawing on personnel from the CIA, FBI, NSA and elsewhere in the intelligence community. Formally known as the Bin Ladin Issue Station, it was codenamed Alec Station, after Michael Scheuer's son's name, as referred to by Able Danger liaison Anthony Shaffer. By 1999 the unit's staff had nicknamed themselves the "Manson Family", "because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat".

The Station originally had twelve professional staff members, including former FBI agent Daniel Coleman. This figure grew to 40–50 employees by September 11, 2001. (The CTC as a whole had about 200 and 390 employees at the same dates.)

CIA chief George Tenet later described the Station's mission as "to track, collect intelligence on him, run operations against him, disrupt his finances, and warn policymakers about his activities and intentions". By early 1999 the unit had "succeeded in identifying assets and members of Bin Laden's organization ...".