Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (29 page)

How could it be that this near-useless system could survive such emphatic rejection not only from the air force’s own testing professionals but from a powerful Senate committee, let alone have little impact where it was needed most? The answer would appear to lie in a classic combination of money, politics, and the ever-diminishing gap between government service and private enterprise, all turbocharged thanks to the Niagara of cash unleashed by 9/11.

In the year before 9/11, Sierra Nevada was a small aerospace company based in Sparks, Nevada, that took in $13 million in government contracts. Twelve years later, that figure had soared to $1 billion, most of it in defense work and much of that “sole source,” that is, without competitive bidding. The owners, Fatih and Eren Ozmen, have long enjoyed amiable relations with politicians. For example, in 2004 they hired Dawn Gibbons, wife of then congressman Jim Gibbons, representing Nevada’s 2nd District, and paid her $35,000 for consulting work. Representative Gibbons was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, in which capacity he helped steer a $2 million defense contract for a helicopter landing system to Dawn’s employer. Everyone denied any connection between the two events. A 2010 Congressional Ethics Office report highlighted the close relationship between Sierra Nevada and PMA, a lobbying firm closely linked to the campaign fund-raising efforts of house members powerful in defense matters, including John Murtha of Pennsylvania and Peter Visclosky of Indiana. (PMA dissolved in 2009, following a criminal investigation and the jailing of CEO Paul Maglioccetti, a former senior staffer on the House Defense Appropriations Committee.) Nonetheless, the House Ethics Committee voted to take no action.

It seemed that Sierra Nevada’s owner, Fatih Ozmen, could echo the significant statement of Neal Blue, the CEO of Predator manufacturer General Atomics: “For our size, we possess more significant political capital than you might think.” In fact, there were many points of similarity between these two defense corporations, both so profitably engaged in the booming business of drones and surveillance. One of them was Big Safari, the secretive air force office that awarded and oversaw the Gorgon Stare contract. Charged with overseeing the acquisition and introduction of “special purpose” air force weapons, the office, officially known as the 645 Aeronautical Systems Group, enjoyed a reputation for its ability to cut corners and move programs swiftly without the customary bureaucratic encumbrances. Such prowess was largely due to the authority granted them to award sole-source contracts without the tiresome necessity of allowing firms to compete on price and performance.

As we have seen, Big Safari played a major role in the development and fielding of Predator, partly thanks to the intervention of former air force chief master sergeant Mike Meermans, who had spent the last five of his twenty-two-year service career working on airborne reconnaissance operations on the air staff, where he enjoyed a close friendship with the group’s leadership. Following his retirement, Meermans embarked on a second career as a senior staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, when he had crafted the legislation mandating that total control of the Predator program be assigned to the air force, and that Big Safari be put in charge of its development. Given Meermans’ subsequent third career as vice president for strategic planning at Sierra Nevada’s Washington office, he was presumably already well informed about the company and its programs. Overall, between 2006 and 2013, Big Safari lavished no less than $3.5 billion on Sierra Nevada in sole-source contracts for which no one else was able to compete. As a source coarsely summarized the relationship to journalist Aram Roston, Big Safari and Sierra Nevada “are so close they share rubbers.”

Among those deals was an $18 million contract awarded in 2011 for the Northern Command Sensor Program, a bizarre air force initiative to get a piece of the war-on-drugs action by flying surveillance planes supplied by Sierra Nevada over parts of Mexico and other regions in hopes of gathering intelligence about narco-traffickers and their operations. It is unclear whether the operation yielded any useful intelligence, but it ended tragically when one of the planes flew into a mountain in Colombia, killing three Americans and one Panamanian on board. The pilot of the twin engine Bombardier Dash-8 was blind in one eye and the plane so thoroughly laden with intelligence equipment that the FAA forbade its use for anything other than “crew training and market surveys.” The altitude warning system was broken. It appeared to have been a pointless operation spawned by public-private collusion and mounted on the cheap, a telling counterpoint to the aura of glamorous mystery that envelops the world of hi-tech spy craft and the covert firms and groups that inhabit it.

11

DEATH BY A NUMBER

September 2, 2010, was the day Mohammed Amin, a Taliban leader in the northeast Afghan province of Takhar, was supposed to die. His death would not come as a total surprise to anyone, least of all him, as the odds against his survival had definitely been lengthening. Given his position as Taliban deputy shadow governor for Takhar, Amin, an ethnic Uzbek in his forties, had strong grounds for believing that he occupied an uncoveted slot on the Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL), as the U.S. kill-roster was officially termed, and was therefore ripe for execution by air strike via drone, helicopter, bomber, or a Special Operations night raid whenever the opportunity arose. The recently installed U.S. commander, General David Petraeus, had expanded the list and doubled the number of such raids as one of his first acts upon arriving in Kabul. The death toll had shot up accordingly: 115 across the country in July 2010 and 394 in August. Indeed, on the very day Amin was to be killed, Petraeus told reporters that special forces operations in Afghanistan were “at absolutely the highest operational tempo,” running at four times the rate ever reached in Iraq.

“Petraeus knew he was only going to be there a short time, a year or so,” a close adviser to the general while he was in Afghanistan told me. “What could he do that would enable him to present good numbers to Congress in a year? The easiest way to generate good numbers was by killing people.”

The renewed emphasis on high-value targeting in Afghanistan, which had already increased tenfold since Stanley McChrystal took over theater command in 2009, had a certain irony. As we have seen, the post-2001 insurgency and revival of the Taliban had to a considerable degree been caused by an obsessive hunt for Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership figures. But the surviving al-Qaeda members had decamped to Pakistan, along with the Taliban leadership. The Taliban remaining in Afghanistan had for the most part retired to private life and wished only to be left alone, resisting initial calls from Pakistani intelligence to start a jihad against the Americans.

Most Afghans were relieved to be free of their incompetent and fanatical rulers and welcomed the Americans and British. However, the dearth of genuine targets was relieved by warlords and others seeking favors from the country’s new masters. Feeding the demand for targets, they fingered business rivals, tribal enemies, and other unfortunates who were duly rounded up and shipped off to the torture chambers at the Bagram base outside Kabul or the oubliette of Guantánamo. Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs, combined with the kleptocratic behavior of the U.S.-installed government, eventually provoked a fierce reaction and a revival of the Taliban. So now, to deal with this insurgency, the United States was embracing the very tactic that had generated the problem in the first place. High-value targeting had in any case become especially fashionable in senior military circles thanks to the glow of the apparent victory over al-Qaeda in Iraq, spearheaded by JSOC’s industrial counterterrorism, and backed by massive troop reinforcements and a shower of cash for Sunni tribal leaders willing to change sides. In addition, the rough-and-ready methods deployed in Afghanistan in 2002 had been replaced by the systematized approach developed in Iraq. Instead of the hit-or-miss dependence on tip-offs from warlords, the JPEL was now largely reliant on the presumed certainties of technical intelligence, principally in the form of drone surveillance (i.e., “the unblinking eye”), the monitoring of phone traffic, and the physical location of phones via their signals.

Mohammed Amin qualified for the list on at least two counts. Apart from his Taliban leadership status, a death warrant in itself, he was also listed as the leading member in Afghanistan of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a jihadi group centered in that neighboring country but also active in Afghanistan.

Even so, securing a place on the JPEL had not been a casual affair. A “Joint Targeting Working Group” composed of representatives of various operational commands and intelligence agencies met once a week to vet the “targeting nomination packets.” As of October 1, 2009, there had been 2,058 names on the JPEL. Execution, in every sense of the word, was primarily the responsibility of Joint Special Operations Command, though in keeping with convention this group was operating in Afghanistan under a code name, which in this period was Task Force 373 (as opposed to Task Force 11, as it had been known in the days of Operation Anaconda). Even in internal classified documents, the involvement of this roving death squad in killings around Afghanistan was deemed highly sensitive, to be concealed at all costs.

The carefully selected and highly trained task force rank and file tended to take a cynical view of the overall utility of their operations. “They’d come into my province, work their way down the JPEL, but they knew and I knew that all those names on the list would be replaced in a few months,” a former U.S. official who worked closely with them in Afghanistan told me. Then he mentioned a phrase that seems to come up a lot in the targeted-killing business: “They called it ‘mowing the grass.’”

Further up the chain of command, there was at least the pretension that the selective killing fit into an overall plan. Petraeus’ “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” instructed intelligence analysts to recommend “targets to isolate from the population, and targets to eliminate.” In the cross hairs were the supposedly critical nodes in the enemy system, which the analysts clearly regarded as akin to a corporate hierarchy helpfully subdivided into specialties such as leader, facilitator, mayor, IED expert, shadow governor, deputy shadow governor, chief of staff, military commission member, financier, and so on.

Along with “leaders,” “facilitators” were a heavily targeted category, these being variously defined either as people who provided safe houses and support, or merely influential people, village elders and landowners who had no choice but to cooperate with the Taliban. Casting doubt on the precision of the undertaking was the fact that public announcements, in the form of ISAF press releases, regarding successful operations (never mentioning the task force role) often tended to describe the same person as both a “leader” and a “facilitator.”

As a deputy shadow governor, Mohammed Amin certainly qualified for a place, complete with four-digit designating number, on the Joint Prioritized Effects List. Once on the list, it remained only for the task force to locate and kill him. His movements between Pakistan and Takhar may have been furtive, but to the “unblinking eye” of ISR, that was irrelevant. All they needed was a phone number.

Just as in Iraq, where the introduction of cell phones had enabled both the insurgents, who used them to communicate and to detonate bombs, and their hunters, who used them to locate and track their quarry, cell phones have played a vital role in the Afghan war ever since they were introduced in 2002. In fact, so crucial was Afghan phone traffic to U.S. intelligence—one in every two Afghans has a cell phone—that it has been credibly reported that the NSA recorded every single conversation and stored them for five years. Just as the Constant Hawk and Gorgon Stare programs had been attempts to look into the past, Retro, as the comprehensive phone-call recording program was called, was a way of listening to the past. Collecting numbers was therefore a high priority involving such devious maneuvers as turning a blind eye to cell phones used by insurgent prisoners in the giant Pol-e-Charkhi jail on the edge of Kabul and other Taliban holding pens around the country. The Taliban, meanwhile, were not unaware of the keyhole that cell phones exposed to the enemy. In an attempt to neutralize their adversary’s advantage, in 2009 they launched a campaign to destroy the system and did indeed blow up over three hundred cell towers, only to abandon the effort thanks to either popular complaint or irritation at the consequent inconvenience to themselves.

Knowing a person’s cell-phone number allows anyone with access to a country’s cell phone network—no problem for Special Operations in Afghanistan—to obtain the phone’s International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number. With this in hand, the phone, or more specifically its SIM card, can not only be intercepted but also tracked within a hundred meters just by triangulating signals from cell towers. But that is not close enough to fix someone in a specific car in a moving convoy, at least not in a remote region, such as the bare hills of Takhar, in northern Afghanistan. A very precise fix on a phone and therefore its owner required the device that mimics cell towers, variously known as Stingray, Triggerfish, or IMSI Catcher, which had already done McChrystal such good service in Iraq.