Michael A Sheehan

Counterterrorism expert whose warnings over Osama bin Laden were ignored

Michael A Sheehan, a former top counterterrorism official for the State Department, the Pentagon and New York City, who sounded an early, but unheeded, warning about Osama bin Laden and the dangers of alqaida before 9/11, died last Monday in Bethesda, Maryland. He was 63.

His death, at Walter Reed National Military Medical Centre was confirmed by his wife, Sita Graham Vasan. He had multiple myeloma, a form of cancer, she said.

Sheehan, an intensely energetic man, started a counterterrorism career of more than three decades as an Army Green Beret, leading a clandestine hostage-rescue assault team in Panama in 1979. Fluent in Spanish, he later carried out anti-drug and counterinsurgency missions in El Salvador, Colombia and Honduras.

A year after retiring from the Army, he was named, in 1998, the State Department’s chief of counterterrorism. Soon he was presciently raising alarms about al-qaida and its leader.

In a secret memorandum written that year, after the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa, Sheehan urged the Clinton administration to step up efforts to persuade Afghanistan and its neighbours to cut off financing to bin Laden and stop giving al-qaida sanctuary, according to an account in the New York Times.

Sheehan’s memo outlined a series of actions the United States could take toward Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen to persuade them to help isolate al-qaida. The document called Pakistan pivotal to the strategy, urged Clinton aides to work with the countries to curb terrorist financing and recommended that the United States go public if any of the governments failed to cooperate.

Sheehan’s plan “landed with a resounding thud,” one former official told the paper.

“He couldn’t get anyone interested,” the official said. Sheehan pressed on. “What’s it going to take to get them to hit al-qaida?” he asked colleagues in 2000. “Does al-qaida have to attack the Pentagon?”

After 9/11, the administration of President George W Bush ultimately took the steps outlined in the Sheehan memo, but the Bush White House, too, was accused of having earlier ignored warnings about the threat of attack by al-qaida.

After the 11 September attacks, Sheehan spent two years as an assistant secretarygeneral of the United Nations, overseeing 16 missions and 40,000 military and police personnel in peacekeeping operations around the globe.

In 2003, Raymond W Kelly, commissioner of the New York Police Department, tapped Sheehan to run the force’s new counterterrorism bureau. In three years he created one of the world’s elite terror-fighting units, overseeing some 220 officers and investigators.

“The foundation of NYPD’S counterterrorismprogramme was built by Mike Sheehan,” Michael O’neil, one of his top police deputies at the time, said in a telephone interview.

Sheehan was searingly critical of the United States’ post9/11 counterterrorism strategies. In “Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorising Ourselves,” published in 2008, he argued that the United States was relying too heavily on bloated security bureaucracies instead of fighting terrorism primarily through the combined efforts of diplomats, commandos, spies and law enforcement.

“Most of the billions spent on new bureaucracies, defence and intelligence contractors, and thousands of new Washington staff officers after 9/11 were unnecessary, in my view,” he told Harper’s Magazine in 2008.

Attack al-qaida and other extremists with targeted raids fuelled by specific intelligence, Sheehan wrote, but avoid the terrorist trap of overreacting to the inevitable domestic strike.

“We must continue to crush their cells relentlessly for another generation, but not overreact to their occasional attacks in the interim,” he told the magazine. “Terrorists succeed when we overreact.”

Colleagues recalled Sheehan’spassion–asoldier-statesman-scholar who described himself as “a door kicker” and “a swamp drainer” (of terrorists around the world).

“That sometimes made him the squeaky wheel or the cranky contrarian voice,” said Nicholas Rasmussen, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre. “But his was a voice that carried unparalleled credibility with his peers in government.”

In 2011, Sheehan was named an assistant secretary of defence overseeing Special Operationsforcesandmilitary drone policy worldwide. After leaving the Defence Department in 2013, he became a fellow at the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point and lectured and consulted.

Michael Andrew Sheehan was born on 10 February 1955 in Red Bank, New Jersey and grew up in Hazlet, New Jersey, the second of seven children of John and Janet (Purcell) Sheehan. His father was a construction engineer, his mother a kindergarten teacher.

He entered the Special Forces after graduating from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1977. He received a master’s degree in 1988 from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and a second master’s, in 1992, from the Army Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The next year, while still on active duty with the Army, he joined the staff of his former Georgetown professor, Madeleine K Albright, when she was US ambassador to the United Nations; he focused largely on peacekeeping issues. (Albright was later secretary of state in the Clinton administration.) He retired from the military in 1997 as a lieutenant colonel.

Sheehan’s first marriage, to Maria Eitel, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife of 18 years, whom he met on a blind date to play tennis, he is survivedbyadaughter,alexandra Eitel, from his first marriage; a son, Michael V Sheehan, from his second marriage; and his father, three brothers and two sisters.

In his final weeks, friends and colleagues say, Sheehan was brimming with enthusiasm about a new e-textbook he was writing for US Military Academy cadets, an assessment on Afghanistan that he was writing for the State Department and a draft of a new security strategy for the 21st century.

Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism scholar at Georgetown University, said of Sheehan, “He was always looking for new angles and new perspectives to solve problems.”

ERIC SCHMITT The Scotsman welcomes obituaries and appreciations from contributors as well as suggestions of possible obituary subjects.

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“His was a voice that carried unparalleled credibility with his peers in government”

nnNew York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.