Cofer Black was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center during the September 11 attacks and the immediate aftermath. He is the public face of the agency’s paramilitary turn on September 12, 2001, and the figure most directly responsible for the CIA’s posture in the early Afghanistan campaign. John Kiriakou describes him with personal admiration: “I always had deep respect for Cofer. We can certainly have disagreements on policy, but man, what a patriot.”[1][2]
The “flies on Bin Laden’s eyeballs” quote
Black is the source of one of the canonical phrases of the post-September 11 period. At a Camp David meeting in the days immediately following the attacks, Black committed to President George W. Bush that he would “see flies on Bin Laden’s eyeballs” when his work was done. The quote — and the visceral conviction it conveyed — is widely credited as the reason Bush placed the CIA, rather than Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense, in operational lead of the early Afghanistan effort.[1]
The September 12 speech
Within an hour of the September 11 attacks, Black stood on a chair outside his Counterterrorism Center office at CIA headquarters and addressed the hundreds of personnel gathered in front of him: “Today, we’re at war and we’re all going to have to fight. Not all of us are going to come home. So if you want to walk out now, walk out and no one will think less of you.” Kiriakou recalls one woman walking out — and her branch subsequently going to the deputy director for analysis to demand that she be removed.[3][4]
The post-9/11 budget
Days after the September 11 attacks — Kiriakou has also dated the conversation to September 12, and elsewhere to “a couple of weeks” after — Kiriakou approached Black with an operational proposal and was given a now-emblematic response that captures the agency’s financial position in that period. Different retellings have Black saying essentially the same thing: “Whatever it is, just do it. I have so much money I can’t possibly spend it all.”[5][6][7][8][9] Kiriakou has said this reflected the CIA’s effectively unlimited post-9/11 budget, and that he was far from the only officer given that latitude — case officers and operations officers were “acting all over the world” on the same basis.[9]
Khartoum station chief and Carlos the Jackal
Before running the Counterterrorism Center, Black was station chief in Khartoum, where he was responsible for the capture of Carlos the Jackal — a background Kiriakou credits with making Black uniquely suited to lead the CIA’s response to a unique terrorist threat like Osama bin Laden.[10]
The pre-9/11 plan, the FBI blackout, and armed drones
In December 1998, Director George Tenet declared war on Osama bin Laden and tasked the Counterterrorism Center with drafting a comprehensive attack plan, previewed to senior CIA management by the end of July 1999 and briefed to the NSA, FBI, and Pentagon by mid-September. The plan called for ringing Afghanistan with secure covert bases and a dedicated bin Laden unit of paramilitary-style commando teams able to blend into the region’s Muslim population, with the goal of capturing bin Laden alive for prosecution.[11][12]
That plan moved forward even as the CIA watched, in real time, pieces of the September 11 plot assemble: between November and December 1999 Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah visited Afghanistan and were selected for the “planes operation,” and in January 2000 the agency — with Malaysian help — watched Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar attend an al-Qaeda conference in Kuala Lumpur.[13] An internal CIA report later criticized Black for keeping the FBI in the dark during this period — specifically, for never informing the Bureau that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had been granted U.S. visas to enter the country.[14] At a July 10, 2001 meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a CIA official known as “Rich B” — Tenet’s assistant — predicted not a single spectacular attack but multiple simultaneous attacks against U.S. interests; per George Tenet’s own memoir, Rich B and Black congratulated each other afterward for finally getting the Bush administration’s attention.[15]
On September 4, 2001 — a week before the attacks — Black urged Tenet to promote arming Predator reconnaissance drones with missiles to target bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. Tenet brought the idea to a long-awaited cabinet-level Principals Committee meeting that same day and won authorization to deploy weapons-capable aircraft — authorization that came, Kiriakou notes, far too late to be operational before the attacks.[16]
The Al-Azhar fatwa proposal
Working inside Black’s Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, Kiriakou — whose expertise was Middle East analysis rather than al-Qaeda operations — proposed a “hearts and minds” propaganda program: securing a fatwa from the Sheikh of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the oldest university in the world and a center of Islamic scholarship, permitting war against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The idea caught the CTC off guard — “they were like, shit, we never even thought of that” — and the agency engaged Egyptian officials; a fatwa was ultimately issued in support of the United States.[17]
”Flies on his eyes… head on a pike”
Kiriakou has grouped Black with Jose Rodriguez, Jim Pavitt, and George Tenet as CIA leaders who, in the period after 9/11, wanted to do “literally anything and everything” to kill bin Laden and destroy al-Qaeda, “human rights be damned, international law be damned” — citing Black’s famous statement that he wanted flies on bin Laden’s eyes and his head on a pike as emblematic of that mindset.[18][19]
Uzbekistan
Kiriakou has said Black, along with fellow CIA officer Richard Blee, spent significant time in Uzbekistan training security forces there — a deployment Kiriakou attributes to regional oil interests and a post-Soviet push to establish forward bases in Central Asia.[20]
Blackwater Vice Presidency
After leaving the CIA, Black became Vice President of Blackwater under Erik Prince — the senior former CIA officer in a board and executive team populated almost entirely by other former agency officers. His role at the company functioned as the operational interface between Blackwater and the CIA, including for the assassination program later shut down by Leon Panetta.[21]
”Kill them all”
Per John Kiriakou, on the evening Kiriakou left for Pakistan in January 2002, he went to Cofer Black’s office to say goodbye. Black got up from his desk, shook Kiriakou’s hand, and whispered in his ear: “kill them all.” Kiriakou: “Really? Are we really there already?"[22][23]
"Flies walking on the eyeballs”
When briefing President George W. Bush on the CIA’s planned response to 9/11, Black promised: “Within a matter of weeks, flies will be walking on the eyeballs of your enemies, Mr. President.”[24][25]
Pakistan visit with Jose Rodriguez
Kiriakou was control officer for Black’s January 2002 visit to Pakistan. The two visited a CIA / ISI safe house in Islamabad where the Pakistanis were holding a high-value al-Qaeda detainee. Black, who had never met an actual al-Qaeda figure in person, asked to be taken upstairs. The detainee — chained to a bed with enough wiggle room to stand — leapt up when Kiriakou unlocked the door. Kiriakou: “Mr. Ahmed Mohammed, this is Mr. Cofer Black of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Black asked the standard humanitarian questions (“are you getting enough food?” “are you sleeping well?” “are they treating you well?”) and left.[26][27]
When Kiriakou returned to the safe house alone for the next interrogation, the detainee thanked him profusely: “Sir, I have to thank you so much for bringing Amnesty International to come and check on me.” Kiriakou: “I didn’t say he was from Amnesty International — I said he was from the Central Intelligence Agency. But the guy heard Amnesty International.”[27][28]
Post-9/11 posture
John Kiriakou has described Cofer Black as emblematic of a revenge-driven mindset that shaped CIA conduct after the September 11 attacks. Black, then director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, famously told President Bush that when the CIA was finished with Osama bin Laden, “his head would be on a stick and there would be flies on his eyeballs.”[29] Kiriakou cited this statement as representative of the motivating logic behind the enhanced interrogation program — that the goal was retribution rather than intelligence collection.
Kiriakou noted that many CIA leaders of Black’s generation feared that their obituaries would be defined by the failure to prevent 9/11, and that this personal reckoning drove them to authorize tactics they would otherwise have rejected.[30]
July 6, 2001 warning
John Kiriakou has repeatedly described a July 6, 2001 briefing — nine weeks before 9/11 — in which he was set to give a routine analyst briefing to a visiting delegation of Middle Eastern (in some tellings, Arab or Gulf) intelligence officers. Instead of the junior analyst they expected, Cofer Black — director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center — walked in himself, along with the head of operations for the bin Laden unit, “Alex Station,” to brief the delegation personally.[31][32] Black told them directly: “Something terrible is going to happen… on an unprecedented scale.” He gave the delegation a series of code words to watch for in future chatter — including “the honey salesman is coming with vast quantities of honey,” “a great wedding,” and references to a “football match” — and coded phrases instructors were reportedly using with students, such as “I’ll see you in paradise.”[33][34][35]
Kiriakou went back to Black’s office afterward to thank him, and asked directly whether the warning had been for the delegation’s benefit or whether Black meant it. Black replied, “Oh, I meant it. Something terrible is going to happen,” — in another telling, “Oh, I’m deadly serious.”[36][37] Kiriakou has connected this to Black’s broader posture that summer: Black, to his credit, was “screaming from the rooftops” that something terrible was coming, while the White House — Condoleezza Rice especially — was not interested, insisting China was the real threat to worry about.[38] Kiriakou has also recalled Black saying “the lights are blinking red” in June, July, and August of that summer, a warning that sat at the top of the CIA without being heeded.[39]
Morning of September 11
Kiriakou described Black on the morning of September 11 at the Counterterrorism Center. As the scale of the attacks became clear, Black’s reaction, in Kiriakou’s account, was one of devastated vindication — he had warned that something terrible was coming and had not been listened to. CIA camp commanders in the field were in contact with headquarters, and Kiriakou recalled the phrase “I’ll see you in paradise” being used by officers who believed casualties among their own people were likely.[40][41]
Kiriakou and Black had a 9:00 a.m. meeting scheduled that morning with Condoleezza Rice at the White House — a minor errand to have three obscure, decades-old declassified cables pulled from a State Department historical volume before it went to print, per one account, and per others simply a standing appointment.[42][43] Kiriakou was in Black’s outer office, watching the small television on his secretary’s desk, when he saw the World Trade Center burning; in one telling he watched the second plane hit the tower, then ran back to his own office shouting to colleagues that they were under attack.[42][44] Headquarters was evacuated shortly after — grudgingly, and only because security officers warned staff they would be arrested if they refused, given a plane still believed to be in the air; Kiriakou abandoned his car partway home and walked the rest of the way alongside tens of thousands of others, then returned a few hours later and did not leave the building again for four days.[45] Kiriakou has said he told his office, on seeing the towers hit, “I think this is what Cofer was talking about.”[46]
Legacy anxiety as motivation
Kiriakou described Black — like George Tenet — as driven in part by anxiety about how history would judge his pre-9/11 performance. The failure to prevent the attacks, despite warnings, shaped the intensity with which Black and others pushed for aggressive action afterward. Kiriakou presented legacy fears as one driver of the enhanced interrogation program.[47] He has said Black was ultimately not punished for the failure to penetrate al-Qaeda before 9/11 despite calls for his removal — he was instead promoted to ambassador and special envoy for counterterrorism.[48]
See also
- Counterterrorism Center
- Blackwater
- Erik Prince
- Special Activities Division
- John Kiriakou