Spotlight with Rolf Mowatt-Larssen

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen spent more than two dozen years in intelligence, both in the CIA and U.S. Department of Energy. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he led the U.S. government's efforts to determine whether al Qaeda had WMD capabilities and to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States. He is now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center. In January, Mowatt-Larssen published a timeline of al Qaeda's attempts to acquire WMD. See http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/19852/

By the time the summer of 2001 rolled around, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen arguably was at the top of his CIA career. He had recently returned from a posting as CIA station chief in Moscow -- the "Broadway" of the spy world, as he jokingly called it --and was learning Chinese to gear up for his next challenge: chief of the CIA station in Beijing. Only a handful of spies had ever served in both capitals, and he was about to become one of them.

But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks upended those plans. CIA Director George Tenet called Mowatt-Larssen back to headquarters and gave him a new assignment: assess whether al Qaeda had developed weapons of mass destruction.

It was more a precautionary measure than anything else; Mowatt-Larssen set out to prove that there was nothing to worry about. The CIA's internal analysis, at that point, dismissed the idea that al Qaeda would attempt to acquire WMD, and Mowatt-Larssen himself was skeptical.

"I was pretty convinced we'd determine that it hadn't gotten far down the road," he said.

What happened over the next several months would change the very nature of the war on terror --as well as Mowatt-Larssen's own career. Always an iconoclast-he once was kicked out of Moscow for being on the wrong side of an internal CIA dispute, and brought back once the issue was resolved in his favor -- Mowatt-Larssen brought the same habit of questioning the status quo to his new post.

The longer he stayed in the job, the more information piled up that al Qaeda was up to something even more dangerous than 9/11. Evidence mounted that al Qaeda had launched not one, but two separate anthrax programs for use in deadly attacks. The CIA also discovered that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had met personally with nuclear experts from a Pakistani NGO and discussed how they should build a nuclear device.

To Mowatt-Larssen, the incidents confirmed that bin Laden and Zawahiri themselves had placed a very high priority on developing nuclear and biological weapons.

"I was not prepared to discover they had that intent," Mowatt-Larssen said. "It was a real stunner. We never found any information that al Qaeda's intent was a dirty bomb. Their intent was a Hiroshima bomb."

As the discoveries mounted, Mowatt-Larssen and his team worked around the clock. He briefed Tenet and other key intelligence officials every day at 5:00 p.m., and Tenet passed the key findings to President George Bush the next morning.

Pakistan became a particular cause for concern. Mowatt-Larssen and Tenet flew to Islamabad and met with then-President Pervez Musharraf to encourage him to crack down on extremist groups. (Musharraf 's initial response: "Men in caves can't do this.")

The WMD position capped a long and storied career for Mowatt-Larssen. After graduating from West Point and serving in the Army, Mowatt-Larssen joined the CIA at age 28. (He was fascinated by spy books, and he applied to the agency on a dare from his brother.)

"I wanted to be the classic espionage spy guy," he said. "I wanted to go to Moscow and battle the KGB. I was lucky enough to get to do that."

His first assignment: Stockholm, where he posed as a member of an arms control delegation. He went through the entire State Department orientation, and served as the ambassador's aide. That not only taught him about arms control, but also gave him perfect opening for his subsequent assignment to Russia, where he joined the political section of the American embassy.

When Mowatt-Larssen arrived in Moscow in the late 1980s, the battle between the KGB and the CIA was at its peak. Every room in his home was bugged. His phones were tapped. He was followed everywhere. (The subsequent arrest of the mole Aldrich Ames helped explain how the KGB kept such good tabs on the CIA's movements).

The great mole wars brought tremendous pressure to both sides. At one point, the KGB even offered one of its own agents to the CIA as a phony spy, and he carefully fed the CIA information as a way to ingratiate himself into the agency. The CIA was split as to whether he was real, with one group arguing that the KGB would never put one of its own in that position. (Much later, after successfully infiltrating the agency, the fake agent failed to show up to a rendezvous, confirming the doubters' suspicions.)

To Mowatt-Larssen, the incident-along with a handful of others-illustrated the disturbing way in which smart agents could examine the same information but draw completely different conclusions. He sees parallels between that and today's nuclear terrorism threat. At the CIA, as now, one of the primary challenges Mowatt-Larssen faced is that many simply did not believe that al Qaeda could pull off an attack of that magnitude.

"The essence of why people don't believe nuclear terrorism is a real threat is because it hasn't happened yet," Mowatt-Larssen said. "That's exactly what caused the mole failure within the CIA. It's very eerie."