The Way of the Knife (17 page)

White House officials were incensed when they received the letter. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley thought Goss’s memo was pure posturing—
the CIA trying to cover its back
in the event of future investigations. Hadley called the CIA director at home on Christmas Day and accused him of not being a “team player.” But Goss wouldn’t budge, and it became clear to officials in the White House that all of the hyperventilating at the CIA, Washington’s most paranoid institution, wasn’t going to subside unless something was done to calm the spies down.

The job fell to Andrew Card, President Bush’s chief of staff. Card drove out to Langley intending to soothe the fears at CIA headquarters, but his visit was a disaster. Inside a packed conference room, Card thanked the assembled CIA officers for their service and their hard work but refused to make any firm declarations that agency officers wouldn’t be
criminally liable for participating
in the detention-and-interrogation program.

The room became restless. Prodded by his chief of staff, Patrick Murray, Porter Goss interrupted Card.

“Can you assure these people that the politicians will not walk away from the people who carried out this program?” Goss asked. Card didn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he tried to crack a joke.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Every morning I knock on the door of the Oval Office, walk in, and say, ‘Pardon me, Mr. President.’ And, of course, the only person the president can’t pardon is himself.”

Card giggled after he said this, but his joke landed with a thud. The White House chief of staff, when asked whether President Bush would protect CIA officers from legal scrutiny, had suggested that the most they might be able to rely on is a presidential pardon after the indictments and the convictions were handed down.

At the CIA, pardon jokes don’t go down well.

—

SOME OF PRESIDENT BUSH’S AIDES
began to see the CIA as a problem. The agency’s director was doing battle with the White House over the detention program, and Vice President Cheney had become convinced that CIA analysts secretly opposed the war in Iraq and were leaking negative assessments about the war to members of Congress and the press. As much as Bush and Cheney had originally tried to resist pressure by the 9/11 Commission to create a director of national intelligence to take control over all sixteen American spy agencies, some at the White House saw an ancillary benefit of the new position: It put the CIA in its place.

A weakened CIA presented an opportunity for Donald Rumsfeld. The worsening situation in Iraq had dampened some of the triumphalism among Rumsfeld and his staff, but the defense secretary continued with his efforts to wage war far from declared war zones—in countries that historically had been the CIA’s turf. In 2004 Rumsfeld issued a secret directive—known internally at the Pentagon as the “Al Qaeda Network Execute Order”—that expanded the powers of special-operations troops to kill, capture, and spy in more than a dozen countries. The order gave Joint Special Operations Command, the unit based at Fort Bragg that Rumsfeld had come to identify as a new model army for the post–September 11 era, broad authority to launch operations across an arc of territory from North Africa all the way to the Philippines. It allowed them to go into Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan. Under the new authorities, the missions were highly classified, seldom publicly acknowledged, and irregularly briefed to members of Congress.

Joint Special Operations Command was now one of the brightest stars in the Defense Department firmament, and the budget for special operations more than doubled over six years,
reaching nearly $8 billion in 2007
. This was still just a sliver of the Pentagon’s budgets for buying ships and jets, but the infusion of money allowed JSOC not only to build more platoons of secret troops but also to spend money on supplies and logistics that would allow Navy SEALs and Delta Force operatives to sustain clandestine operations for days or weeks on end. No longer was JSOC capable merely of twenty-four-hour hostage-rescue missions. It could run wars of its own.

JSOC was proving as much in Iraq. There, Lt. General Stanley McChrystal’s task force had been handed the mission of attacking the al Qaeda franchise in the country led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Wave upon wave of deadly violence was washing over the country, and al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had claimed responsibility for devastating attacks on American troop convoys and Shi‘ite holy sites. Within months of the beginning of the insurgency, it became clear to commanders on the ground that the war would be sucking American troops into the country for years, and Rumsfeld and his senior intelligence adviser, Stephen Cambone, gave JSOC a long leash to try to neutralize what had become the Iraqi insurgency’s most lethal arm.

The mantra of the task force, based inside an old Iraqi air-force hangar at Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, was “fight for intelligence.” In the beginning, the white dry-erase boards that McChrystal and his team had set up to diagram the terror group were blank. McChrystal realized that much of the problem came from the poor communication between the various American military commands in Iraq, with few procedures in place to share intelligence with one another. “We began a review of the enemy, and of ourselves,” he would later write. “
Neither was easy to understand
.” Just how little everyone knew was apparent in 2004, amid reports that Iraqi troops had captured al-Zarqawi near Fallujah. Since nobody knew exactly what the Jordanian terrorist looked like, he was released by accident.

But a campaign plan eventually developed. Night raids against al-Zarqawi’s network were designed not just to kick down a door and spray gunfire in all directions. McChrystal believed that what was important was not body count but the intelligence that could be gathered through interrogations and computer forensics at the spot of the raid. The intelligence trail could then be followed to the next suspected safe house, where more senior al Qaeda operatives were hiding. Put a needle into one vein, the theory went, and you can learn about the entire system.

McChrystal tried to ensure that his task force wasn’t crippled by the same rivalries that had hurt special-operations missions in Afghanistan. He courted CIA officers in Iraq and convinced a senior CIA officer to sit beside him each morning for the task force’s daily battlefield update. Thousands of miles away, analysts working in a nondescript government building in Fairfax, Virginia, each day sifted through the intelligence from the previous night’s raids in Iraq that had been
extracted from thumb drives
, cell phones, and computer hard drives. Over time, the dry-erase boards filled up with the names and aliases of al-Zarqawi’s operatives. The various names were connected by lines drawn with black marker—everyone’s best guess about how an amorphous terror network carried out its business.

JSOC’s rapid growth was aided by an internal Pentagon study commissioned by Rumsfeld and completed in 2005. The report recommended that the military “must increase capabilities and capacities to conduct
sustained operations
in multiple, sensitive, non-permissive, and denied areas.” Translated from militaryspeak: Wage simultaneous secret wars in as many places as possible. Written by former JSOC commander General Wayne Downing and Michael G. Vickers—a former CIA clandestine officer who had gained a degree of fame when his role in running guns to Afghanistan during the Soviet war was detailed in the book
Charlie Wilson’s War—
the report had instant currency with Rumsfeld. Its primary conclusion was that special-operations troops should take a greater role in the Bush administration’s war against al Qaeda and other terror groups. Special-operations troops were well positioned in Iraq and Afghanistan, it concluded, but not the wars of the future. “
The future fight,” it read
, “will take place in countries with which we are not at war.”

The Pentagon had even begun carrying out
risky spying missions inside Iran
. Taking advantage of the commercial traffic crossing Iraq’s eastern border into Iran, special-operations troops were paying agents to cross the border using phony cover stories to collect intelligence about military installations inside western Iran. The foreign agents were both Iranian Muslims and Coptic Christians who could easily get past Iranian border security, telling stories about their plan to buy truckloads full of fruit or other merchandise inside Iran. With such limited cross-border forays, it was difficult for the Pentagon to get truly valuable intelligence from these missions, and the Pentagon wasn’t authorized to conduct any sabotage operations or to kill Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops.

The real goal, said a senior Pentagon intelligence official during that period, was to build up as much of an intelligence network as possible inside Iran—a network that could be tapped if President Bush or one of his successors decided to invade the country. Like so many other military missions in undeclared war zones, the operations in Iran were justified as “preparation of the battlefield.”

The work of soldiers and spies was becoming increasingly blurred. The CIA still had more expansive authorities than the Pentagon to carry out missions anywhere in the world, but after Rumsfeld’s 2004 order it became harder to see real differences between the mission of the military and the mission of the CIA. McChrystal had developed a good rapport with American spies inside of Iraq, but the military’s missions into Iran had not been coordinated with the CIA, and with so many secret operatives crawling around the world’s darkest corners, the lack of coordination created the potential for a major catastrophe.

—

OR A MISSED OPPORTUNITY.
After Donald Rumsfeld called off the 2005 Bajaur mission in Pakistan because he thought that the hastily planned operation was freighted with too much risk, both the Pentagon and CIA conducted an inquest to figure out what had gone wrong and to make sure the debacle wouldn’t be repeated. The review determined that there were no established procedures in place for authorizing an emergency mission into a country beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon and CIA were carrying out parallel secret operations across the globe, but neither the defense secretary nor the CIA director had the authority to take charge when an opportunity arose to launch a secret mission into a country such as Pakistan. Over the next year, the Pentagon and CIA tried to work out a division of labor, carving up the world and determining
who was in charge of each front
of the secret war.

Stephen Cambone led negotiations for the Pentagon, and deputy CIA director Vice Admiral Albert Calland was in charge of the CIA team. Whether the CIA or JSOC would be in charge of secret operations in a particular country depended on a variety of factors: How willing was that country to allow special-operations troops on its soil? What was the strength of the relationship between the CIA and a country’s spy service? Just how prickly might a specific CIA station chief be about ceding control in his country to JSOC?

Because of the Bajaur episode, Pakistan was at the top of the list for the negotiators. President Musharraf had given his blessing to drone strikes, but he still vehemently opposed American combat operations in the tribal areas. It was fine for things to “fall out of the sky,” but not for them to come marching over the border from Afghanistan. Trying to sell Musharraf on special-operations ground campaigns in places like North Waziristan and Bajaur was, most people in Washington agreed, a hopeless endeavor.

The CIA proposed a solution. In order to get special-operations troops inside Pakistan, they would simply be turned over to the CIA and operate under Title 50 covert-action authority. Special-operations troops would be “sheep-dipped”—the SEALs would become spies. Special-operations troops would be able to launch operations into Pakistan, and Musharraf would never be told. As one former CIA officer described the arrangement, the special-operations troops “basically became the CIA director’s armed platoon.” The exact same trick would be used six years later, when helicopters carrying teams of Navy SEALs took off from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and crossed the border into Pakistan for the raid that would kill Osama bin Laden. That night, the SEALs were under CIA authority, and CIA director Leon E. Panetta was technically in charge of the mission.

In other countries, it was JSOC that was in control, and commando missions escalated in countries like the Philippines, where special-operations troops were already posted. In 2006, an American military drone fired missiles at a suspected terror camp in the jungles of the southern Philippines, based on intelligence that Umar Patek, one of the ringleaders of a 2002 terrorist attack in Bali, was hiding at the camp. The missile strike, which the government of Manila announced publicly as a “Philippine military operation,”
missed Patek but killed several others
. The military was never able to determine how many of them were followers of Umar Patek and how many were women and children.

The ballooning budgets for special operations also allowed JSOC to buy new eavesdropping equipment that gave commandos the ability to collect intelligence inside Pakistan from the sky. Beechcraft airplanes would regularly take off from airstrips in Afghanistan, fly over the spine of mountains separating Afghanistan and Pakistan, and turn into flying cell-phone towers. Inside the Beechcraft planes, a device called a “Typhoon Box” housed dozens of phone numbers that military spies suspected were used by Pakistani militants. The device could identify when one of the numbers was being used and pinpoint its location. Even if a phone was switched off, JSOC had the ability to turn the phone on; it would then
give away the precise coordinates
of whoever was carrying it.

—

AFTER THE NEW DEALS
were struck with the CIA, JSOC operatives that had been “sheep-dipped” and turned into CIA officers could act on the intelligence with ground operations in Pakistan. One year after the mission into Bajaur was scotched, the CIA once again picked up information about a gathering of military leaders, once again in the Bajaur Agency, in the tribal areas.