Dirty Wars (48 page)

Soon after he assumed office, Obama began pressing Panetta about the hunt for bin Laden. By May 2009, Obama told the CIA director that he needed to make the manhunt his “
number one goal
” and instructed Panetta to deliver a “
detailed operation plan
” for locating bin Laden. Panetta had thirty days to put the plan together and then began providing the president with weekly updates on progress made on the effort, even when there was little to report.

As the hunt for bin Laden intensified, the drone strikes continued. So too did the civilian deaths. On June 23, the CIA killed several alleged militants with a Hellfire missile in South Waziristan, then followed up hours later with an attack on the funeral mourning their deaths.
Scores of civilians
—estimates ranged between eighteen and forty-five—were killed. “
After the prayers
ended people were asking each other to leave the area as drones were hovering,” said a man who lost his leg in the attack. “First two drones fired two missiles, it created a havoc, there was smoke and dust everywhere. Injured people were crying and asking for help...they fired the third missile after a minute, and I fell on the ground.” US intelligence reportedly
believed that Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban would be “
among the mourners
.” He was not, at least when the drones struck.

The elusive Mehsud had already survived over a dozen reported attempts to kill him, between Bush and Obama, which had resulted in hundreds of collateral deaths. But then, in early August, US intelligence tracked Mehsud down to his
father-in-law's house
in a village called Zanghara in South Waziristan. On August 5, CIA drones fired at him as he reclined on the house's rooftop with family members and other guests. Two Hellfire missiles ripped Mehsud in half, killing eleven other people at the house.

In October 2009, Obama reportedly expanded the “
target boxes
” in Pakistan, broadening the area in which the CIA could go after targets, gave the agency authorization to acquire more drones, and “increased resources for the agency's secret paramilitary forces.” Obama had already authorized
as many drone strikes
in ten months as Bush had in his entire eight years in office.

ALTHOUGH THE CIA WOULD TAKE MUCH
of the credit and criticism for the US drone program in Pakistan, it was not the only player. JSOC had its own intelligence operations inside Pakistan and, at times, conducted its own drone strikes. At the center of both the JSOC and CIA targeted-killing programs were members of an elite division of Blackwater, who assisted in planning the assassinations of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive actions inside Pakistan. Some elite Blackwater SELECT personnel worked for the CIA at “
hidden bases
in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft.”

Blackwater operatives also worked for JSOC on a parallel program that was run out of Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan. US military intelligence and company sources told me that some Blackwater personnel were given rolling security clearances above their approved level. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), the Blackwater personnel were granted entry to a Special Access Program. “
With an ACCM
, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above ‘secret'—even though you have no business doing so,” a US military intelligence source told me. It allowed Blackwater personnel who “do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust,” he added. “Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle
of love.” As a result, Blackwater had access to “all source” reports that were culled in part from JSOC units in the field. “That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors,” said the source. “We have contractors that regularly see things that top policymakers don't unless they ask.”

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater-JSOC operation in Pakistan was referred to as “Qatar cubed,” in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. “This is supposed to be the brave new world,” he told me. “This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate.”

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater teams also helped plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Blackwater did not actually carry out the operations, the military intelligence source told me, which were executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something? Did Rumsfeld come back into power?” When civilians are killed, “People go, ‘Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works.”

CIA operations were subject to congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC ops. “Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that,” my source told me in 2009. “Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four [other] people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality.” He added, “They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?”

As President Obama and his new cabinet began reviewing the covert actions and programs built up under Bush, they were faced with a series of tough choices on which to end and which to continue. The labyrinth of the CIA-JSOC-Blackwater covert action program in Pakistan was a legacy
of the infighting and secrecy that had played out within the US counter-terrorism community since the early days after 9/11. As a senator, Obama was critical of Blackwater and
introduced legislation
to try to hold it and other private security companies accountable. Now, as commander in chief, he was confronted by briefings from the CIA and US military about their necessity to covert US operations. Laying out policy visions on the campaign trail was one thing, but confronting the most secretive, elite forces in the US national security apparatus would be no easy task. And, for the most part, Obama elected to embrace—not restrain—those very forces. The more the president became involved with the day-to-day running of the targeted killing program, the more it expanded. By the end of his first year in office, Obama and his new counterterrorism team would begin building the infrastructure for a formalized US assassination program.

WASHINGTON, DC, AND YEMEN,
2009—The day Obama signed an executive order mandating that the Guantánamo prison be shut down, opponents of his order received a substantial boost to their cause when it was revealed that a former Gitmo prisoner who was released as part of a US-supported rehabilitation program run by Saudi Arabia had resurfaced in Yemen and declared himself an al Qaeda leader. Logged at Guantánamo as
prisoner number 372
, Said Ali al Shihri was one of the first detainees taken to the prison, on January 21, 2002, after being captured on the Afghan-Pakistan border. According to the Pentagon's version of events, Shihri had trained in urban warfare tactics in Afghanistan and was an “
al Qaeda travel facilitator
,” funding fighters. According to documents from his administrative review at Guantánamo, Shihri said he had gone to Afghanistan after 9/11 to participate in humanitarian relief operations. Ultimately, in November 2007, the Defense Department decided to repatriate Shihri to Saudi Arabia. After he completed the rehabilitation program, which was supported by the Bush administration, he
went missing
. Whether he was a member of al Qaeda before going to Guantánamo is the subject of debate. What happened after he was released is not.

In January 2009, Shihri appeared on a video with another Saudi who had been imprisoned at Guantánamo, Abu Hareth Muhammad al Awfi, and two infamous Yemeni members of al Qaeda: Nasir al Wuhayshi and Qasim al Rimi. In the video, posted on YouTube in late January, the four men, dressed in a mishmash of tribal garb and military gear, announced the formation of a new, regional organization, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). “
By Allah
, imprisonment only increased our persistence in our principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for,” declared Shihri, wearing a keffiyeh on his head and sporting a belt of bullets slung over his shoulder. Although the name AQAP was known in some intelligence circles, particularly in Saudi Arabia, prior to the posting of the video, for much of the world it was the debut of a rebranded al Qaeda. It was no coincidence that the quartet of men in the video was evenly split between Saudis and Yemenis. It was a statement about the perceived
illegitimacy and collusion of the Saudi and Yemeni governments. The new AQAP “
transformed al Qaeda in Yemen
from a subsidiary of the franchise into its primary regional office by swallowing its once-larger sibling in Saudi Arabia,” according to Middle East scholar Barak Barfi, a research fellow at the New America Foundation. Wuhayshi “and his cadres have effectively rebuilt a dead organization and even made it stronger.” That month, Saudi Arabia released a list of its “
85 Most Wanted
” individuals. Twenty of them, according to Saudi intel, had joined AQAP in Yemen.

Al Qaeda was back with a vengeance in Yemen. A National Counter-terrorism Center report released in early 2009 concluded: “The security situation in Yemen
deteriorated significantly
over the past year as al-Qaida in Yemen increased its attacks against Western and Yemeni government institutions.” For much of the first year of the Obama presidency, Yemen was seldom mentioned publicly outside of a small circle of national security officials and journalists. Instead, the administration focused on its escalation of the war in Afghanistan and a drawdown of the US troop presence in Iraq.

The covert counterterrorism approach for much of the first year of the Obama presidency was dominated by ratcheting up the CIA's drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, coupled with occasional covert action from JSOC. The president repeatedly said the focus of the US war against al Qaeda was centered in the tribal areas straddling the Afghan-Pakistan border. “
I don't think there's any doubt
any longer that there has been a developing syndicate of terror, and those tentacles reach far and wide,” Obama's new secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said in one of her first major appearances in front of the Senate. “Yes, they do reach to Somalia, to Yemen, to the Maghreb, et cetera. But they are focused and grounded in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Obama's senior national security officials, though, knew early on that the harder they hit in Pakistan, the more likely it was for al Qaeda to find havens elsewhere.

When Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama's newly appointed director of national intelligence, testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on February 25, 2009, he asserted that al Qaeda's headquarters were in the tribal areas of Pakistan but added, “We are concerned about their ability to move around. It's kind of like
toothpaste in a tube
.” Blair said, “Of particular concern are the expanding al Qaeda networks” in “North Africa and the emerging and intensifying al Qaeda presence in Yemen.” Yemen, he said, “is re-emerging as a jihadist battleground,” adding bluntly: “We are concerned about the potential for homegrown American extremists, inspired by al Qaeda's militant ideology, to plan attacks inside the United States.”

Obama's newly appointed CIA director echoed Blair's concerns. “This is
a very persistent enemy
that we're dealing with,” Panetta told a group of journalists he invited to Langley for a roundtable discussion. “When they are attacked, they go and they find ways to regroup; they find ways to make their way to other areas. And, that's why I'm concerned about Somalia, that's why I'm concerned about Yemen...because of that kind of possibility. So I don't think we can stop just at the effort to try to disrupt them; I think it has to be a continuing effort because they aren't going to stop.” He warned that Yemen and Somalia could “become safe havens” for al Qaeda.

During the presidential campaign, John McCain and other Republicans had attempted to portray Obama as ill equipped to deal with the threat of international terrorism. But from the first days of his administration the new president was, in fact, extremely focused on escalating the covert US war against al Qaeda and expanding it far beyond Bush-era levels, particularly in Yemen.

Two days after the election, when president-elect Obama received a global security briefing from director of national intelligence McConnell, he told Obama that, second to the al Qaeda presence in the tribal areas of Pakistan, an “
immediate threat
was al Qaeda in Yemen.” Two weeks later, when Obama met with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs, Obama was told that despite substantial US intelligence on the resurrection of al Qaeda in Yemen, “
adequate plans
” did not exist for confronting it. Less than a year into Obama's presidency, a senior White House official publicly blamed the Bush administration for allowing al Qaeda to “regenerate” in Yemen and Somalia, “
establishing new safe-havens
that have grown over a period of years.”