The Way of the Knife (18 page)

The tiny village of Damadola had been under surveillance for some time, since al Qaeda captive Abu Faraj al-Libi told Pakistani intelligence officers he had once met Ayman al-Zawahiri at the house of Bakhptur Khan, a Damadola villager. The CIA had carried out a drone strike in Damadola in January 2006, narrowly missing al-Zawahiri. And, months later, when the intelligence tip came in about another meeting in Damadola, a team of Navy SEALs was sent into the village.

With the new procedures in place, CIA and military
officials took only hours
to analyze the intelligence and approve the operation. General John Abizaid, commander of United States Central Command, was in Washington when the CIA received the intelligence tip, and Abizaid jumped into a black SUV and raced to Langley in a motorcade. Shortly after Abizaid and Porter Goss had agreed on the final details of the raid, helicopters took off from Afghanistan and delivered the SEALs over the border into Bajaur.

The troops stormed the compound, wrestled several people to the floor, and bound them with plastic handcuffs. The prisoners were loaded into the helicopters and brought back into Afghanistan.

Inside the Counterterrorism Center at Langley, CIA officers gathered around a television screen to watch a video feed from a Predator, which was circling above the compound in Damadola—a staring, unblinking eye allowing spies thousands of miles away to watch the operation unfold. The SEALs captured no senior al Qaeda leaders on the operation. But the Damadola mission proved they could get into Pakistan undetected, conduct a snatch operation, and return to the other side of the border without Pakistan’s government ever being wise to the mission.

8:
A WAR BY PROXY

“Me and my nation against the world. Me and my clan against my nation. Me and my family against the clan. Me and my brother against the family. Me against my brother.”

—Somali proverb

B
y spring 2006, the CIA operatives in Nairobi, Kenya, were loading unmarked cargo planes with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and AK-47s and flying the shipments to airstrips controlled by Somali warlords. Along with the weapons, they sent suitcases full of cash, about two hundred thousand dollars for each warlord as
payment for their services
in the fight against terrorism. For a group of men who had been trying to kill one another at various times over the years, the warlords had no qualms about working together once the CIA opened up its coffers. They even managed to come up with a Washington–friendly name for their partnership: the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). The name was unintentionally ironic, given the brutal history of some of the warlords, like Abdi Hasan Awale Qeybdii and Mohamed Qanyare Afrah. Even in parts of the CIA, the group became the butt of jokes. Some American spies compared the acronym ARPCT with SPECTRE, the global terrorist organization from the James Bond films.

Jose Rodriguez had signed off on a plan developed by spies in Nairobi to escalate a program of running guns and money to the warlords, who had convinced the Americans they would help battle a burgeoning radical threat in the chaotic, impoverished nation.
*
The collection of warlords, some of the same men who had dispatched gunmen to kill Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos in 1993, had been on the CIA’s payroll in 2002. They had helped the CIA hunt down members of al Qaeda’s East Africa cell, some of whom had been smuggled out of Somalia to CIA black sites. But the covert operation in 2006 was a more formal arrangement, and it turned into a Washington-sanctioned boondoggle for the warlords.

The spiraling chaos in Iraq had not only drawn soldiers and spies away from the war in Afghanistan; it had also inspired a new generation of young Muslims to take up arms against the United States. At that time, drafts of a classified intelligence report circulating through American spy agencies laid bare the metastasizing problem of radicalization in the Muslim world. The final report concluded that Iraq had become a “‘cause célèbre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and
cultivating supporters
for the global jihadist movement.”

The report, a National Intelligence Estimate, predicted that an increasingly decentralized global jihad movement would splinter even further, with regional militant groups proliferating. The landscape was changing dramatically, and countries in North Africa, East Africa, and impoverished parts of the Arabian Peninsula were becoming increasingly unstable.

In Yemen, twenty-three militants linked to al Qaeda escaped from a local jail using spoons and broken table legs to dig a tunnel. They likely had help from members of Yemen’s security services who were sympathetic to the prisoners’ cause from the days of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. As one Yemeni official explained the inside job to the
New York Times,
“You have to remember, these officers used to escort people from Sana’a to Pakistan during the Afghan jihad.
People made relationships
, and that doesn’t change so easily.” Interpol issued an urgent global alert seeking the arrests of the twenty-three men, but most did not go far. They stayed in Yemen, forming the core of a group that would eventually name itself
al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
.

Then there was Somalia, and the rise to prominence of a small, stubby man with almond-shaped eyeglasses and, protruding from his chin, a tuft of hair that he dyed with red henna. Hassan Dahir Aweys led the shura council of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union, a loose federation of clan elders, businessmen, and magnates who had joined together to bring order to Somalia’s chaos by imposing Islamic sharia law. The courts, which for years had been dominated by moderates, were widely popular in Somalia because they offered a reprieve from decades of warlordism. But by late 2005, Aweys’s influence over the ICU had turned the organization into a larger version of his sharia court in the port city of Merca: a platform for preaching an uncompromising brand of Islam that regularly meted out
punishments like stoning adulterers
and severing the hands of thieves.

Aweys had been on an American list of top terror suspects for years, and the CIA had linked him to the al Qaeda cell in East Africa that had carried out the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. And yet he operated in plain sight, making high-profile trips to Dubai and moving openly among cities in Somalia. Under his command were a band of young, committed gunmen who had taken to calling themselves “al Shabaab”—Arabic for “The Youth.” The group would roam the streets of Mogadishu, hunting and killing anyone believed to have pledged allegiance to Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government,
a weak and corrupt organization
created by the United Nations that had little control inside the country. Locals suspected of spying for the Americans were shot on sight.

The CIA had not kept a permanent station inside Somalia for years, so the job of monitoring events inside the country fell to the clandestine officers in neighboring Kenya. The CIA station in Nairobi had grown significantly since the September 11 attacks, getting more money and personnel after CIA director Porter Goss decided that the agency needed to beef up its presence in Africa and
reopen some of its previously shuttered stations
on the continent. During the final months of 2005 and into 2006, alarming cables from spies in Nairobi arrived in Langley warning about the growing influence of the red-bearded Hassan Dahir Aweys and the al Shabaab gunmen. Some of the reports concluded that the young radicals inside the Islamic Courts Union, including a gangly veteran of the Afghanistan war named Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, could feather the nest for al Qaeda operatives to set up a new base in Somalia.

But as much as Osama bin Laden and his followers might have wanted to establish a home in Somalia, the group over the years had confronted some of the same problems in the war-ravaged country that the Americans had. Put simply, al Qaeda didn’t understand Somalia, and a plan by the group to flee to Somalia once the war in Afghanistan had begun had failed miserably. Arab militants who arrived in the country had trouble navigating the dizzying array of clans and subclans knit into the fabric of Somali culture, and
found themselves being extorted
by clan elders at every turn. Rather than unite under a single banner to expel Westerners from the country, Somalis decided they would rather fight one another. Al Qaeda militants, adherents to the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam, could not relate to the more moderate Sufism that the vast majority of Somalis practice. Somalis had a reputation for being tremendous gossips, and the foreign visitors grew angry that they couldn’t keep secrets. All told, the chaotic African country by the sea seemed very different from the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This was hardly clear at the time to anyone in military or intelligence circles in Washington, and the alarming CIA reports out of Nairobi started getting attention at the White House. But what exactly was to be done if Somalia was going the way of Afghanistan? With the ghosts of the Black Hawk Down episode—the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu—still haunting the halls of the Pentagon, Army generals already had made it clear they might resign before the United States attempted another significant military intervention in Somalia. Besides, the wars elsewhere were sapping the ranks of soldiers and Marines, and the Pentagon could hardly spare troops for the Horn of Africa beyond what it had committed to the bare-bones task force in Djibouti, operating out of a former French Foreign Legion camp there. With the Bush administration convinced that Somalia was a problem that needed to be solved, the White House turned to the CIA to find a proxy army to fight a new war for Mogadishu. So was born the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism.

The warlords of the ARPCT were hardly discreet about their ties to Washington and bragged openly about how much the CIA was paying them. But the tradecraft used by the Americans was also shoddy, making it readily apparent that the alliance was a CIA front. The gun shipments and money drops were broadcast in the local press. Agency officers supplied the warlords with contact information to use when they needed more supplies, and rumors spread through the capital that the CIA men had even given out an e-mail address to use when the warlords needed more guns and money.

The clumsiness of the CIA had divided officials inside the American embassy in Nairobi, a fortress built after the 1998 bombing had destroyed the previous building. The entire operation was being run by the CIA’s station chief in Kenya, but diplomats at the compound began writing cables back to State Department headquarters warning about blowback from the covert support to the warlords. In one of the cables, Leslie Rowe, the embassy’s second-ranking officer, described the anger among African officials about the CIA effort. Michael Zorick, the State Department’s political officer for Somalia, sent a scathing cable to Washington criticizing the warlord policy and complaining that
the CIA was running guns
to some of the biggest thugs in Somalia. Soon afterward, Zorick was reassigned to Chad.

Just as some of these officers had warned, the covert operation blew up in the CIA’s face. Instead of weakening the Islamists, it tipped the balance in Somalia in the other direction. Somalis began to embrace the Islamic Courts Union as the way to rid the country of foreign influence and finally bring an end to the warlord rule that had Balkanized the country. During a meeting of American ambassadors from East Africa and Yemen in May 2006, the American officials could already see things unraveling inside Mogadishu. With nobody able to agree about what the next steps should be, the ambassadors agreed on the importance of “changing the conversation” from the fighting in the Somali capital toward “
positive U.S. steps
” to help restore Somali institutions.

What had once been a standoff turned into a rout, as the Islamists drove the CIA-backed warlords out of Mogadishu. The ICU consolidated its power in the capital. Even more disastrous for Washington, the Battle of Mogadishu gave even greater influence inside the ICU to Hassan Dahir Aweys and the radical band of al Shabaab gunmen.

Hank Crumpton, the former spy at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, watched the disaster unfold from his desk at the State Department, where he had taken a job as the coordinator for counterterrorism. The job carried the lofty title of ambassador-at-large but was hobbled by its location inside an underfunded and occasionally dysfunctional diplomatic machinery. For Crumpton, the CIA’s warlord adventure in Somalia was a classic example of Washington turning to covert action when a problem seemed too difficult to solve in a different way. What do you do when you can’t figure out what to do in Somalia? “Here’s some money. Here’s some weapons. Now go,” he said.

“Absent a foreign policy, covert action isn’t going to work,” he said. “And if you can describe to me the U.S. government’s foreign policy in Somalia in 2006, or even now, I will give you a ten-dollar bill.”

The CIA’s station chief in Nairobi took the brunt of the withering internal criticism. Jose Rodriguez pulled the officer from Kenya, and the CIA decided it had had enough with Somalia for the time being. With the Islamic courts now in power in Mogadishu, Bush officials began speaking about Somalia as a new terror state. Jendayi Frazer, the State Department’s senior official for Africa policy, made public speeches during the last half of 2006 about direct connections between the ICU and al Qaeda and bluntly labeled the ICU “terrorists.”

—

THE COLLAPSE
of the CIA effort in Somalia had, for the moment, exhausted the Bush administration’s options for dealing with the rise of the Islamists there. But where governments feared to tread, new opportunities were emerging for private military companies and would-be contractors eager to wade into the anarchy in East Africa.