Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (30 page)

Sometime in early July 2010, the task force scored a breakthrough, arresting a man who revealed that he was a relative of Mohammed Amin and obligingly furnished his phone number. With this in hand, the trackers were swiftly able to locate Amin’s IMSI number and thus fix at least the general location of the SIM card, assumed to be in close proximity to its owner.

In the early summer the SIM-card trackers registered that Amin was in Kabul, making and receiving calls to and from locations around the country, all of which were submitted to the exotic algorithms of social-network analysis, tracing and measuring the links of his network both as a Taliban leader and as a leader of the Uzbek Islamists. At some point the watchers noted that Amin was now calling himself Zabet Amanullah—clearly an alias, they assumed—on the phone.

Later in July, the card began moving north, out of Kabul and up to Takhar. In those wide-open spaces Amin would be that much more vulnerable to a strike, and since he was already on the list, it only remained to choose the method and place to kill him. Technically, JPEL designees are liable for kill
or
capture, but as subsequent events indicated, no one was too interested in capturing the Taliban official.

On September 2, the perfect opportunity arose. The SIM card, and therefore the phone it was in and the person carrying that phone, set out early in the morning from a district in Takhar called Khwaja Bahuddin and headed west. Streaming video from a drone showed a convoy of six cars passing through mountains and making occasional brief halts during which people apparently carrying weapons got out of the cars for a minute or so. The drone could carry an IMSI Catcher, so on video screens at JFSOC headquarters and at Hurlburt DCGS in Florida—and perhaps on multiple additional screens across the neural net of ISR—the crucial SIM card signaled the car in which it was riding. Eventually the convoy rolled into an area of bare, low hills with occasional defiles.

A little after 9:00 a.m., as the first two vehicles moved out of one of these narrow passes, two fighter jets detailed for the operation began the attack. The first bomb landed beside the target vehicle, gouging a crater in the road five feet across and eighteen inches deep and flipping the vehicle over on its side. The watchers saw “dismounts” run from the other vehicles, turn the target vehicle right side up, and help passengers get out. A second bomb hit ten minutes after the first, this time landing directly on the target vehicle. The explosion blew apart at least seven people, leaving severed legs, arms, and other body parts strewn around the wreckage.

The planes dropped another bomb ten minutes later and another ten minutes after that. The lengthy intervals, atypical of normal bombing tactics, signified the time it took for the analysts to locate the target phone via the IMSI Catcher on the drone circling overhead. But the bombs were ineffective: one exploded harmlessly on the hillside, and the other, a dud, hit the road some distance away and failed to explode. Adopting a different approach after the second miss, the commander directing the operation ordered two helicopters, “Little Bird” MH-6s, to finish the job. Accordingly, while one circled, the other dropped down low and hovered just above the ground, allowing the crew a clear view of survivors milling around the car. “It seemed as if the helicopter pilot had a picture … in his hand,” a survivor later recalled, surmising that he was looking for a particular target. Finally he loosed off a burst of machine gun fire that put a bullet right through the face of the man holding the phone. Then he began to move, circling around to take a closer look at the bodies and survivors from the rest of the convoy. The helicopters stayed on the scene for another hour before returning to base, leaving ten people dead at the scene. It had been a textbook targeted killing.

That same day, ISAF issued a press release on the strike, as it normally did following operations of the secret task force:

Kabul, Afghanistan (Sept. 2) – Coalition forces conducted a precision air strike targeting an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan senior member assessed to be the deputy shadow governor for Takhar province this morning.…

Intelligence tracked the insurgents traveling in a sedan on a series of remote roads in Rustaq district. After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft conducted a precision air strike on one sedan and later followed with direct fire from an aerial platform.

The strike was deemed important enough for the secretary of defense himself, Robert Gates, who happened to be visiting Kabul, to call attention to it at a press conference the next day: “I can confirm that a very senior official of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was the target and was killed.… This is an individual who was responsible for organizing and orchestrating a number of attacks here in Kabul and in northern Afghanistan.”

But Mohammed Amin did not die that day. The real target had been the SIM card tracked so meticulously by “intelligence.” Very unfortunately, it did not belong to Amin but to the real-life Zabet Amanullah, a man the task force analysts had confidently assumed did not exist. He had indeed existed, as a quick phone call to any of a host of provincial or Kabul officials—or even a glance at a newspaper—would have made clear. He had been campaigning for his nephew, a candidate in the upcoming Afghan parliamentary election, and he had been on his way to a rally when he was killed. The ground around his burned and twisted vehicle was littered with election posters, with slogans such as “for a better future” still legible. The dead, campaign volunteers all, included five close relatives, among them his seventy-seven-year-old uncle.

Afghans, from President Karzai on down, were well aware of these obvious facts and said so. It made no difference. The spell cast by technical intelligence, with its magical tools of IMSI Catchers and cell-phone geolocation and social-network analysis algorithms and full-motion video, was too powerful for the truth to intrude, even after a dogged and resourceful investigator laid out the truth for all to see.

Kate Clark had none of the high-tech intelligence aids, but she knew more about Afghanistan than those who did. She had arrived in Kabul in 1999, when the country was still in the iron grip of the Taliban regime. She was the BBC correspondent, and the sole Western journalist in the country. Expelled in March 2001, she returned after the regime fell at the end of that year and continued reporting for the BBC until May 2010, when she joined the in-depth research group Afghanistan Analysts Network. Clark was perfectly aware that the high-tech assassins had murdered the wrong man, or rather men, because she had known Zabet Amanullah well. She had listened to the diminutive five-foot-two-inch Uzbek’s life story, which included fighting successively for the Soviet-backed Afghan regime, the anti-Soviet U.S.-backed Mujaheddin, and the Pakistani-backed Taliban prior to 2001. He also recounted his serial torture experience, first at the hands of the Soviets, then while imprisoned by the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud (who kept him in a two-foot-by-two-foot-by-two-foot box for six months), and finally by ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. These last, as he told Clark, were angry because he refused to join the reborn Taliban and go to fight the Americans. “They hung me from the ceiling by my wrists and by my ankles and beat me with chains.”

Finally released by the Pakistanis in 2008, Amanullah had fled to Kabul, where he supported himself by opening a pharmacy while anxiously soliciting character references and guarantees of protection from influential figures in the capital and his home province. In the maelstrom of modern Afghan politics, alliances and enmities are always fluid. The real-life ambiguities of the relationships and connections required for survival in such a society do not necessarily conform to the neat abstractions represented in the diagrams generated by social-network analysis. So when Amanullah decided in July to leave Kabul and go north to campaign for a nephew running for Parliament against a notorious Takhar strongman, one of the people he contacted was the influential Takhar Taliban official Mohammed Amin, whose calls were duly recorded and irretrievably entered into the system by Amin’s hunters.

Then came the inexplicable mix-up. Somehow, amid the swirling petabytes of America’s global surveillance system, the information identifying Amanullah’s SIM card, the IMSI number, was logged as belonging to Amin. From that point on, the task force had its unblinking eye on the former torture victim, nicknamed “Ant” for his short stature. Fixated on what their cell phone tracking equipment was telling them, they adopted the unshakable conviction that the Ant was in fact Amin, traveling under an alias. It was Amanullah whom they had followed north out of Kabul to Takhar, waiting and watching for the right time and place to attack. With eyes always on the telltale electronic signal, Amanullah’s exuberant election rallies, the fifty-car convoy of well-wishers that escorted him to his home village, his pictures in the newspapers, his radio interviews, his daily phone calls to district police chiefs informing them of his movements—all passed the high-tech analysts by. In a feat of surreal imagination, they did not question the unlikely proposition that an important figure in the Taliban would be traveling the countryside in a highly visible convoy or that the people who got out of the cars on that last trip through the mountains “apparently carrying weapons” might in fact be carrying cameras to photograph the scenery (as indeed they were). No one seemed to notice that the man holding the phone, killed with a carefully aimed bullet in the face from the helicopter, was actually calling the police. Their electronic data told them all they wanted to know.

Rapid and outraged Afghan protests that the strike had killed innocent civilians did little to shake military confidence that they had done the right thing. “We’re aware of the allegations that this strike caused civilian casualties, and we’ll do our best to get to the bottom of the accusations,” said Major General David Garza, deputy chief of staff for Joint Operations. “What I can say is these vehicles were nowhere near a populated area and we’re confident this strike hit only the targeted vehicle after days of tracking the occupants’ activity.” All of the dead, as far as the command staff were concerned, were ipso facto insurgents by virtue of their keeping company with Amin, whatever he was calling himself.

Just to be absolutely sure that Mohammed Amin had not somehow infiltrated the convoy, Kate Clark tracked down and interviewed each and every survivor of the attack, not only getting their stories but also checking on who had been sitting in each seat in the six cars. Looking through Amanullah’s passport, which he had left in his Kabul apartment, she saw that he had visited Delhi for a few days in late April 2010, at a time when intelligence had the Taliban leader Amin in Takhar, organizing attacks on Americans.

In December, Clark had a breakthrough. David Petraeus, the allied commander in Afghanistan who had made his name as the general that plucked victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq, had always been assiduous in courting journalists, with great benefit to his public image. Impressed by Clark’s reputation as an acute and influential observer of Afghan affairs, the general invited her to dinner. Seizing the opportunity, she brought up the Amanullah case. Petraeus was unyielding in his stated conviction that they had got the right man. As he told a TV interviewer, “Well, we didn’t think. In this case, with respect, we knew. We had days and days of what’s called ‘the unblinking eye,’ confirmed by other forms of intelligence, that informed us that this—there’s no question about who this individual was.”

Confident of the story as well as his proven ability to charm the press, the general actually granted Clark rare access to the mysterious unit that had organized the killing. “He basically ordered the Special Forces to be frank with me, as he was so happy that they’d got the right person,” Clark told me later. Within a few days she was sitting with the notoriously unreachable Joint Special Operations Task Force as they revealed the process that had led them to target the convoy: the extraction of Amin’s phone number from the relative they had held in Bagram, the correlation with the SIM card, the tracking of the SIM north to Takhar in July, and their utter certainty that they had got the right man, even if he was calling himself by another name.

The experienced journalist was astounded at what she was hearing about the process that had led to the deliberate killing of ten people. The Special Forces refused to accept that they had mixed up two individuals, insisting that the technical evidence that they were one and the same person was “irrefutable.” They freely admitted that they had not bothered to research the biography of the man they thought they were killing. Amazingly, they claimed total ignorance of Zabet Amanullah’s existence. When she pointed out that Amanullah’s life and death were a matter of very public record, they argued that they were not tracking a name but “targeting the telephones.”

“I was incredulous,” she told me. “They actually conflated the identities of two people, and they didn’t do any background checks on either person. They had almost no knowledge about Amin, and they hadn’t bothered to get any knowledge about Amanullah. It’s quite shocking.” Despite all Clark told them, the Special Operations warriors’ faith in their technical intelligence remained unshaken.

The final nail in the coffin for the official story came six months after the attack. Michael Semple is an Irishman who has spent decades in Afghanistan getting to know the country intimately, speaks Dari (one of the principal languages), and, with his beard and habitual dress, can pass as an Afghan. As such, he has been able to forge contacts with many Taliban (getting himself expelled from Afghanistan by the Karzai government for his pains in 2008). In March 2011, six months after the death of Amanullah, Semple, after months of patient investigation, tracked down the real Mohammed Amin, very much alive and living in Pakistan. Amin readily confirmed many of the details unearthed by Clark, including his position as deputy shadow governor, the detention of a relative at Bagram, and the fact that Amanullah had been in telephone contact with him and other Taliban. In fact, according to Amin, the two men had spoken to each other on the phone just two days before Amanullah was killed. “There should not be any serious doubt about my identity,” Amin told Semple. “I am well known and my family is well known for its role in the jihad. Anyone who knows the personalities of the jihad in Takhar will know me and that I am alive.”