Excerpts from CIA Counterterrorist Center Director Cofer Black which appeared in the Joint Inquiry Committee’s Final Report, completed December 2002, said: “Despite several years of effort the CIA had been unable to recruit a single agent inside the core al Qaeda leadership. Black knew that the CIA was in trouble ‘without penetrations of [the] UBL [Usama bin Laden] organization,’ as a classified Counterterrorist Center briefing to [President Bill] Clinton’s national security Small Group put it late in 1999. ‘While we need to disrupt operations…we need also to recruit sources,’ Black’s briefing documents declared, even though ‘recruiting terrorist sources is difficult.’ ” [The 15th of the month used for date sorting purposes only.]
– Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, Page 496