Dirty Wars (88 page)

According to well-connected Somali sources, the CIA was reluctant to deal directly with Somali political leaders, who, despite public praise, were regarded by US officials as
corrupt and untrustworthy
. Instead, the United States put Somali intelligence agents directly on its payroll. Somali sources with knowledge of the program described the agents as lining up to receive
$200 monthly cash payments
from Americans, in a country where the average annual income was about $600. “They support us in a big way financially,” said the senior Somali intelligence official. “They are the largest [funder] by far.”

It was unclear how much control, if any, Somalia's president had over this counterterrorism force or if he was even fully briefed on its operations. The CIA personnel and other US intelligence agents “
do not bother to be in touch
with the political leadership of the country and that says a lot about the intentions,” Abdirahman “Aynte” Ali, the al Shabab researcher who also had extensive sources within the Somali government, told me. “Essentially, the CIA seems to be operating, doing the foreign policy of the United States. You should have had State Department people doing foreign policy, but the CIA seems to be doing it across the country.” The Somali officials I interviewed said the CIA was the lead US agency on the Mogadishu counterterrorism program, but they also indicated that US military intelligence agents are at times involved. When asked if they are from JSOC or the Defense Intelligence Agency, the senior Somali intelligence official responded, “We don't know. They don't tell us.”

As the CIA built up its Somali intelligence agency, CIA Director Leon Panetta appeared before Congress and was asked about the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa. “Our approach has been to develop operations in each of these areas that will contain al Qaeda and go after them so that they have no place to escape,” he said. “So we are doing that in Yemen. It's obviously a dangerous and uncertain situation, but we continue to work with elements there to try to develop counterterrorism. We're working with JSOC as well in their operations.
Same thing is true for Somalia
.”

After I broke the story of the CIA's counterterrorism program in Somalia for the
Nation,
one Somali official told the
New York Times
that the CIA-backed spy service was becoming a “government within a government.” “No one, not even the president, knows what the N.S.A. is doing,” he said. “The Americans are
creating a monster
.”

According to former detainees, the NSA's underground prison, which was staffed by Somali guards, consisted of a long corridor lined with filthy
small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February 2011, he saw
two white men
wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air as thick, moist and foul-smelling. Prisoners, they said, were not allowed outside. Many developed rashes and scratched themselves incessantly. Some had been detained for a year or more without charges or access to lawyers or family. According to one former prisoner, inmates who had been there for long periods would
pace around constantly
, while others leaned against walls, rocking.

A Somali journalist
who was arrested in Mogadishu after filming a sensitive military operation told me that he was taken to the prison and held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man's nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents.

Once in custody, according to the senior Somali intelligence official and former prisoners, some detainees were freely interrogated by US and French agents. “Our goal is to please our partners, so we get more [out] of them, like any relationship,” the Somali intelligence official told me. The Americans, he said, operated unilaterally in the country, but the French agents were embedded within AMISOM at its airport base. Indeed, in July 2011, I witnessed a French intelligence agent, with an AMISOM commander, monitoring the passengers disembarking a flight from Nairobi. Somali intelligence sources told me the French sometimes ask for passengers to be
snatched from flights
and questioned. According to Aynte, in some cases, “the US and other intelligence agencies have notified the Somali intelligence agency that some people, some suspects, people who have been in contact with the leadership of al Shabab, are on their way to Mogadishu on a [commercial] plane, and to essentially be at the airport for those people. Catch them, interrogate them.”

The underground prison was housed in the
same building
once occupied by Somalia's infamous National Security Service (NSS) during the military regime of Mohamed Siad Barre, who ruled from 1969 to 1991. A former prisoner told me he actually saw an old NSS sign outside. During Barre's regime, the notorious basement prison and interrogation center, which sat behind the presidential palace in Mogadishu, was a staple of the state's apparatus of repression. It was referred to as Godka, “
The Hole
.”

“The bunker is there, and that's where the intelligence agency does interrogate people,” said Aynte, who maintained contact with Somali intelligence officials. “When CIA and other intelligence agencies—who actually
are in Mogadishu—want to interrogate those people, they usually just do that.” Somali officials “start the interrogation, but then foreign intelligence agencies eventually do their own interrogation as well, the Americans and the French.” The US official made available to me for comment said that American operatives' “debriefing” of prisoners in the facility had “been done on only rare occasions” and always jointly with Somali agents.

In a dramatic flourish that appeared to fulfill his campaign promise to close the CIA's infamous “black sites” established under President Bush, Obama had signed Executive Order 13491 on January 22, 2009. The order required that “the CIA
shall close as expeditiously as possible
any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” To human rights groups, the use of the underground prison appeared a backdoor subversion of that order. After the publication of my report on the prison in the
Nation
and a subsequent, related article by Jeffrey Gettleman in the
New York Times,
a coalition of human rights groups wrote a letter to President Obama. The articles, they said, “
further call into question
whether the United States is in compliance with its obligations to respect, and ensure respect for, international human rights requirements relating to
non-refoulement,
arbitrary detention, and humane treatment.” Citing Obama's signing of Executive Order 13491, they told the president, “You made clear your deep commitment to ensuring that counterterrorism operations are conducted with respect for human rights and the rule of law. We urge you to reaffirm that commitment by disclosing, to the fullest extent possible, the nature of U.S. involvement in overseas detention, interrogation, and transfer operations relating to the prison in Somalia, so that there can be meaningful public dialogue regarding the extent to which such operations comply with the law.”

Despite the early rhetoric from President Obama and his surrogates about the need to balance liberty and security, two years into his administration it was clear that the White House had repeatedly chosen national security over civil liberties. And though some of the excesses of the Bush era were ended and others curbed, the kill/capture program was growing, not abating. Many serious questions still loomed over the targeted killing program: Was it actually making America safer? Would these operations result in less terrorism or more? Would the actions taken by the White House in the name of defeating terrorism—drone strikes, assassinations, renditions—actually aid groups like al Shabab, AQAP and the Taliban in recruiting new members and supporters?

IN EARLY
2011, al Shabab was in firm control of a greater swath of Somalia than the Transitional Federal Government, even though the TFG was supported by thousands of US-trained, -armed and -funded African Union troops. In Mogadishu, despite increased US funding and weapons, AMISOM forces were largely confined to their bases. Instead of fighting a counterinsurgency, they opted for
regular shelling
of al Shabab-held neighborhoods teeming with civilians. JSOC was bumping off militant figures, but the civilian death toll of AMISOM's shelling pushed some clan leaders to lend support to al Shabab. Meanwhile, the Somali government was viewed as weak, illegitimate or worse.

“Ninety-nine percent of the government are corrupted, immoral, dishonest people, selected by the international community,” Mohammed Farah Siad, a Mogadishu businessman, told me when I visited him at his home near the port of Mogadishu during the summer of 2011. Siad, who had owned his business since 1967, complained of having to regularly pay bribes and of government officials stealing from him and other importers. “I think those people must be selected by being in the category of the worst. The more you are criminal, the more you are a drug abuser, the more you will be selected as member of the Somali parliament.” The government, he declared, existed “to cheat money.” Siad, who adamantly condemned al Shabab and al Qaeda, said that al Shabab was far better organized than the Somali government, and he believed that if the AMISOM troops pulled out, al Shabab would take power. “Immediately, in half an hour,” he exclaimed. “Less than a half an hour.” Somalis, he said, were faced with a choice between the government “thieves” and the al Shabab “criminals.” “We are like orphans,” he concluded.

Al Shabab controlled what “amounted to be about half of Somalia, which is the size of Texas. So you could imagine the large amount of the country—including a portion of Mogadishu, the capital city,” Aynte estimated. It was abundantly clear that if the Somali government was incapable of building police and military forces that could stabilize even the capital, the influence of al Shabab would continue to grow. Each suicide bombing was evidence that the government was vulnerable and every mortar that crashed into civilian areas sent a message that the government—and the US-backed African Union force—was not on the side of the people.

With most Somalis caught between a government they despised and Islamic militants they feared, the Obama administration unveiled what it referred to as a “
dual-track
” approach to Somalia. It would simultaneously deal with the “central government” in Mogadishu, as well as regional and clan players in Somalia. “The dual track policy only provides a
new label
for the old (and failed) Bush Administration's approach,” observed Somalia
analyst Afyare Abdi Elmi. “It inadvertently strengthens clan divisions, undermines inclusive and democratic trends and most importantly, creates a conducive environment for the return of the organized chaos or warlordism in the country.”

The dual-track policy encouraged self-declared, clan-based regional administrations to seek recognition and support from the United States. “Local administrations are popping up every week,” said Aynte at the time. “Most of them don't control anywhere, but people are announcing local governments in the hopes that [the] CIA will set up a little outpost in their small village.”

By mid-2011, “In Washington, American officials said debates were under way about just how much the United States should rely on clandestine militia training and armed drone strikes to fight the Shabab,” according to the
New York Times.
“Over the past year, the American Embassy in Nairobi, according to one American official, has become a hive of military and intelligence operatives who are ‘chomping at the bit' to
escalate operations in Somalia
.”

While the United States ratcheted up both its rhetoric and its strikes against al Shabab, its tactical successes were largely in rural areas outside of Mogadishu. In the Somali capital, the CIA-trained and -funded counterterrorism force brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results,” the senior Somali intelligence official told me in the summer of 2011. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces had been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in al Shabab-controlled areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in an al Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in the death of several agents. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalled. On February 3, 2011, al Shabab
broadcast the execution
of an alleged CIA informant on its al Kataib television channel.

While the CIA's newest project in Somalia struggled to achieve any victories, the United States waged its campaign against al Shabab primarily by continuing to support the AMISOM forces, which were not conducting their mission with anything resembling surgical precision. AMISOM regularly put out press releases boasting of gains against al Shabab and the retaking of territory, but the reality was far more complicated.

As I walked throughout the areas AMISOM had retaken in 2011, I saw a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by al Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretched continually for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by al Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remained of guerrilla warfare positions. Not only had
the al Shabab fighters been cleared from the aboveground areas, the civilians that once resided there were cleared, too. On several occasions when I was there, AMISOM forces fired artillery from their airport base at the Bakaara market, where whole neighborhoods had been totally abandoned. Houses lay in ruins and animals wandered, chewing trash. In some areas, bodies had been hastily buried in trenches with dirt barely masking the remains. On the side of the road in one former al Shabab neighborhood, a decapitated corpse lay just yards away from a new government checkpoint.