The Way of the Knife (11 page)

The law offered little guidance as to what constituted “traditional military activities,” partly because the George H. W. Bush White House and Pentagon had successfully lobbied Congress to keep the language vague. These activities were ultimately defined as any operations carried out by the military that were connected to “
ongoing” or “anticipated” hostilities
. In other words, the Pentagon could justify sending troops to any country in the world if it could make the case that the United States was at war inside that country—or might be at some point in the future.

These arcane provisions were little discussed for a decade, until the days after the September 11 attacks when Congress gave President Bush a sweeping mandate to wage war all over the globe. According to the provisions of the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the United States was not at war
with
any one particular country but at war
in
any country where al Qaeda was operating. The measure, in effect, gave Rumsfeld the license he was looking for to carry out a global war.

Still, it took time for the defense secretary to exploit these new powers. Not long after the fall of Kabul, in late 2001, the energies of senior leaders at the Pentagon turned almost immediately to planning for an invasion of Iraq. And beyond the al Qaeda safe havens like Pakistan, the Pentagon had difficulty figuring out where else the United States could hunt al Qaeda. In the counterterrorism vernacular, the requirement was to “find, fix, and finish” terrorists. But as Rumsfeld would admit years later, “
We had the ability to finish
. We just couldn’t find and fix things.”

—

RUMSFELD AND HIS TEAM
were feeling quite sure of themselves during the first half of 2003. The invasion of Iraq had seemed, at first, to confirm much of Rumsfeld’s vision for a new way of war. The march to Baghdad that had lasted barely a month was conducted with a relatively small invasion army—testing the defense secretary’s philosophy that advances in technology, twinned with a war plan that emphasized speed over muscle, could win the wars of the twenty-first century. His skepticism about the CIA’s intelligence had also led him, the year before the invasion, to set up a small shop at the Pentagon—overseen by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith—to sift through raw intelligence to prove that Saddam Hussein was in league with Islamic terrorists. Once American troops had reached Baghdad, many of Rumsfeld’s aides had convinced themselves, it was only a matter of time before they would find definite proof of a link between Hussein and Osama bin Laden and a post facto justification for the invasion. Ultimately, American troops found no such evidence, and the conclusions of Rumsfeld’s intelligence shop were largely discredited.

But with Saddam Hussein gone and the administration divided about whether Syria ought to be the next target of the Bush administration’s “regime change” strategy, Rumsfeld’s planning for the global special-operations war intensified. Robert Andrews had left the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld replaced him with Thomas O’Connell, another veteran of the paramilitary wars of Vietnam and a former Gray Fox commander. O’Connell had deployed to Vietnam in 1970 as a military adviser to the Phoenix Program, the controversial CIA-led campaign to turn the tide of the war by capturing and assassinating Viet Cong leaders. He had spent most of his adult life in the special-operations-and-intelligence world, and he had been JSOC’s top intelligence officer when Representative Dick Cheney visited the command in 1986.

His job interview with Rumsfeld had gone particularly well, mostly because O’Connell’s views on the Pentagon’s authorities and the role of special-operations troops were exactly what Rumsfeld wanted to hear. “
If we’re at war
, why do I have to put my people under CIA authority?” Rumsfeld asked O’Connell early on during the meeting.

“You don’t,” O’Connell replied quickly. “You have the power to send U.S. forces into any part of the world that you want.”

In O’Connell’s mind, Congress had given the Pentagon broad authorities to carry out a global war to gather intelligence or launch killing operations, and Rumsfeld ought to use them. He saw parallels to the Vietnam War, when President Nixon started a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia and Laos because he believed those countries had become safe havens for enemy fighters. But the difference, O’Connell thought, was that Rumsfeld had even more authority than Nixon had, because now Congress had essentially given the Pentagon its blessing to send troops wherever it believed al Qaeda fighters were hiding.

At the time, Rumsfeld was also looking for leverage in his fights with the CIA and he decided to consolidate all of the military’s disparate and often haphazard intelligence-gathering operations into one office. He tapped his loyal aide Stephen Cambone as the first under secretary of defense for intelligence, giving the brainy and prickly Cambone extraordinary power to oversee all Pentagon spying efforts. Rumsfeld would even revamp the civilian line of succession in the Pentagon hierarchy in the event he and his deputy died or were incapacitated. Cambone, the intelligence chief, was put next in line and given an office right next to Rumsfeld’s.

Rumsfeld appointed as Cambone’s deputy Lt. General William “Jerry” Boykin, a Delta Force veteran who had been in the Iranian desert in 1980 during the botched operation to rescue the American hostages. Boykin was a born-again Christian who wore religion on his sleeve and occasionally spoke about the war against Muslim extremists in biblical terms. He often called it a war against “Satan” and once told a church congregation that in the early 1990s he knew that his hunt for a Somali warlord would be successful because he “knew that [his] God was a real God and [the Somali’s] was an idol.”

Boykin was also evangelical about pushing the military to the edge of its legal authorities. Since the Beirut hostage crises of the 1980s, he had been frustrated that Pentagon bureaucrats had been too timid about
making use of groups like Delta Force
. As he did with O’Connell, Rumsfeld peppered Boykin with questions during his job interview about the limits of the defense secretary’s authorities to send troops outside of war zones. Boykin gave a similar response as O’Connell had: You have the authority, and you ought to use it.
You don’t need to put your troops
under the control of the CIA.

Rumsfeld got a boost in his efforts to build an empire for unconventional warfare in the summer of 2004, when the 9/11 Commission recommended in its final report that the CIA be stripped of all of its paramilitary functions and that the Pentagon serve as the only agency carrying out clandestine warfare. The commission had excoriated the CIA for its inability to kill Osama bin Laden and thought that the agency’s clandestine operations were in disarray. The panel recommended that the CIA improve intelligence collection with less reliance on foreign spy services, overhaul the way it conducted analysis, and perform “non-military” covert actions, like propaganda campaigns. Secret wars and drone strikes, the commission believed, were the job of the Pentagon.

“Whether the price is measured in either money or people, the United States cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret military operations, secretly operating standoff missiles, and secretly training foreign military or paramilitary forces,” recommended the commission in its final report, published in July 2004.

That, of course, was exactly what Rumsfeld thought, and days after the report was released he asked Tom O’Connell to get more information about what led to the recommendation. After speaking with John Lehman, the former Navy secretary and a 9/11 commissioner, O’Connell reported back that the commission had found the CIA’s approach to paramilitary operations “muddled.” In a memo to Rumsfeld, O’Connell wrote that Lehman had told him the 9/11 Commission was struck by the CIA’s “unwillingness to take risk” and the fact that the agency was “reluctant to pull the trigger when opportunities were presented.” The biggest problem, Lehman had told O’Connell, was that the Pentagon had the capabilities for hunting-and-killing operations, but
the CIA had the authorities
.

Rumsfeld put Cambone in charge of investigating whether this recommendation could be enacted, and soon Cambone was asking deeper questions about whether CIA operations should be pared down even further. In late September 2004, Cambone wrote to Rumsfeld that he wasn’t sure it made sense for the CIA to be carrying out
any
covert action—which he said could be viewed as an “operational activity not unlike that of a Combatant Commander.” In other words, maybe the Pentagon should be taking over covert action as well. The problem, Cambone wrote, was that the CIA was in charge of
both
covert action and analysis, creating the potential for “bias” when assessing the efficacy of a specific covert action. Put differently,
the CIA was set up to grade its own work
.

The point might have been self-serving, but it got to the heart of a more profound question: Can an agency in charge of a targeted-killing campaign against al Qaeda provide dispassionate assessments about the impact that very campaign was having on the strength of al Qaeda? It was a question Obama officials would face years later after the spy agency escalated its drone war in Pakistan.

In the end, both Rumsfeld and CIA director Porter Goss advised President Bush that the Pentagon didn’t need to wrest secret military operations away from the CIA. Rumsfeld had become convinced that he could do what he wanted—even if the CIA was doing it in parallel—under the banner of “traditional military activities.” Goss had also waged a quiet lobbying campaign to protect the CIA’s turf, urging White House officials not to consider the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation. It was a temporary moment of agreement for the Pentagon and CIA and hardly an end to the battles between the two agencies.

Already by 2004, small teams of JSOC operatives had begun fanning out on spying missions across the globe, to South America and Africa and Asia and the Middle East. They went to France to try to gather intelligence about Islamic militant groups there, and one team had to leave Paraguay in a hurry after one of Rumsfeld’s spies pulled a gun in the middle of a bar fight. As one former Pentagon official who helped oversee the program put it, “We had all these guys running around trying to be James Bond, and it didn’t work very well.”

Some of the teams, given the innocuous-sounding name Military Liaison Elements, were stationed inside American embassies. Others stealthily entered foreign countries and began their spying missions without notifying the American ambassador or CIA station chief in the country. Because the whole world was now a war zone, Pentagon officials figured, the special-operations teams would answer to military commanders, not to the civilian ambassador.

One afternoon, the American ambassador to Jordan, Edward W. Gnehm, was sitting in his office when the embassy’s defense attaché walked in and put a note on his desk. It was a message from the Pentagon, sent directly to the attaché and
meant for only him to see
. A military intelligence team would soon be arriving in Jordan, the note read, and the team would be gathering information about the stability of the Jordanian regime. By no means, the message read, were the ambassador or the CIA station chief to be told about the Pentagon’s activities in Jordan.

The defense attaché sitting in the ambassador’s office had, of course, ignored this admonition. After the meeting, Gnehm promptly told the CIA station chief, who, as Gnehm remembered it, “hit the roof.”

5:
THE ANGRY BIRD

“This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane.”

—Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann, American officer in Vietnam

O
fficers inside the operations room at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center watched video of the Toyota Land Cruiser bumping over the desert road in Yemen’s Ma’rib province, the legendary birthplace of the Queen of Sheba. It was an uncomfortable ride for the six men crammed into the dusty four-by-four, but nothing about the truck typically would have raised suspicions among Yemeni police or soldiers on that day in November 2002. But from the backseat of the truck, a cell phone belonging to Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was betraying the location of the most wanted man in Yemen. An armed CIA Predator was flying overhead.

The United States had fingered al-Harethi as the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the destroyer U.S.S.
Cole,
an attack that killed seventeen sailors as the ship was refueling in the Gulf of Aden. The attack had put al-Harethi near the top of the Bush administration’s list of al Qaeda operatives marked for death, and when a team of American special-operations troops landed in Yemen in the spring of 2002, they made hunting al-Harethi a priority. But al-Harethi was a veteran of the mujahedeen war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and whatever survival skills he hadn’t learned while battling the Soviets he had honed during a decade of hiding from the secret police in the United Arab Emirates and from the shock troops loyal to Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. In 2000, Osama bin Laden had sent al-Harethi to Yemen to plan the
Cole
bombing and to set up al Qaeda training camps. More than once, al-Harethi had embarrassed President Saleh by escaping capture just as Yemeni troops were closing in.

The mercurial Saleh had immediately seen the financial benefits of siding with the United States in its new war but had insisted that the Bush administration do it on his terms. He had managed to stay in power in Yemen since the 1970s by navigating the shoals of tribal blood feuds and Shi‘ite separatists, and he wasn’t about to let America begin a stealth war in his country without getting something in return. On a trip to Washington two months after the September 11 attacks, he managed to wrangle $400 million in aid during meetings with President Bush, Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet. He gave his blessing to a small group of American special-operations troops coming to Yemen
but insisted that they fire weapons
only in self-defense. Without telling Saleh, the Pentagon also sent operatives from Gray Fox, the Army spying unit that specialized in intercepting communications, along with the commandos.