The Way of the Knife (2 page)

“Raymond Davis,” the officer responded.

“Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”

“Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked.

“Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.

Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”

Behind the chair where Davis had taken a seat, another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update.

“
Is he understanding everything
? And he just killed two men?”

Raymond Allen Davis—a former high school football and wrestling star from western Virginia, a retired Army Green Beret and onetime private soldier for Blackwater USA, and now a clandestine CIA operative in Pakistan—had hours earlier been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs, and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan.

But by 2011, the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn, and factions that once had little contact with each other had cemented new alliances to survive the CIA’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India had begun aligning themselves closer to al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was the very reason why Raymond Davis and a CIA team had set up operations from a safe house in the city.

But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who had approached his car with guns drawn, while riding a black motorcycle, at a traffic circle congested with cars, bicycles, and rickshaws. Davis had taken his semiautomatic Glock pistol and blown a handful of bullets through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men in the stomach, arm, and elsewhere on his body. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his Honda and shot several rounds into his back.

He radioed the American consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the car struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then left with Davis still standing in the middle of the road.
An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia
was scattered at the scene, including a black mask, approximately one hundred bullets, and a piece of cloth with an American flag. The cell phone inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously.

Within days of the debacle at the traffic circle, the CIA director would lie to Pakistan’s spymaster during a phone call and private meeting, denying that Davis worked for the CIA. President Barack Obama was vague during a press conference about Davis’s role in the country, calling for the release of “
our diplomat in Pakistan
.” The CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who had arrived in the country just days before the shootings, fought openly with the American ambassador there, insisting that the United States give no ground, and cut no deals, to secure Davis’s release. The game in Pakistan had changed, he said, and the time of friendly relations between the CIA and Pakistan’s spy service had passed.

From now on, things would be handled according to
Moscow Rules
—the unwritten, unforgiving ways of spycraft practiced between enemies during the Cold War.

In an instant, the bloody affair seemed to confirm all the conspiracies ginned up inside crowded bazaars and corridors of power in Pakistan: that the United States had sent a vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of a covert American war in the country. The wife of one of Davis’s victims, convinced that her husband’s killer would never be brought to justice, swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison.

But the Davis affair also told a bigger story. The former Green Beret hired by the CIA for a manhunt in Pakistan was the face of an American spy agency that has been transformed after a decade of conflicts far from declared war zones. No longer a traditional espionage service devoted to stealing the secrets of foreign governments, the Central Intelligence Agency has become a killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting.

And just as the CIA has come to take on tasks traditionally associated with the military, with spies turned into soldiers, so has the opposite occurred. The American military has been dispersed into the dark spaces of American foreign policy, with commando teams running spying missions that Washington would never have dreamed of approving in the years before 9/11. Prior to the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon did very little human spying, and the CIA was not officially permitted to kill. In the years since, each has done a great deal of both, and a military-intelligence complex has emerged to carry out the new American way of war.

The historical contours of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are by now well known. But for more than a decade a separate and parallel war has been waged, a dark reflection of the “big wars” that America began after the September 11 attacks. In a shadow war waged across the globe, America has pursued its enemies using killer robots and special-operations troops. It has paid privateers to set up clandestine spying networks and relied on mercurial dictators, unreliable foreign intelligence services, and ragtag proxy armies. In places where the United States couldn’t send ground troops, fringe characters materialized to play outsize roles, including a chain-smoking Pentagon official who teamed up with a CIA figure from the Iran–Contra scandal to run an off-the-books spying operation in Pakistan, and an heiress from the horse country of Virginia, who became obsessed with Somalia and convinced the Pentagon to hire her to hunt al Qaeda operatives there.

The war has stretched across multiple continents, from the mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Yemen and North Africa, from the simmering clan wars of Somalia to the dense jungles of the Philippines. The foundations of the secret war were laid by a conservative Republican president and embraced by a liberal Democratic one who became enamored of what he had inherited. President Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation. In the words of John Brennan, one of President Obama’s closest advisers whom Obama eventually tapped to run the CIA, instead of the “hammer” America now relies on the “scalpel.”

The analogy suggests that this new kind of war is without costs or blunders—a surgery without complications. This isn’t the case. The way of the knife has created enemies just as it has obliterated them. It has fomented resentment among former allies and at times contributed to instability even as it has attempted to bring order to chaos. It has short-circuited the normal mechanisms for how the United States as a nation goes to war, and turned the American president into the final arbiter of whether specific people in far-off lands live or die. This way of war has had many successes, including the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden and his most trusted followers. But it has also lowered the bar for waging war, and it is now easier for the United States to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth than at any other time in its history. What follows is a story about an experiment that has lasted more than a decade, and what has emerged from the laboratory.

—

SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE SAW
a glimpse of the future just weeks after the September 11 attacks. The head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Dearlove came to the United States with other top British intelligence officials to show solidarity with the United Kingdom’s closest ally. Dearlove arrived at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to deliver the message personally that British spies were opening up their books, giving the CIA rare access to all the MI6 files on members of al Qaeda.

The British had tutored the Americans in the dark arts during World War II but had long approached the spy game differently. In 1943, one member of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive complained that the “American temperament demands quick and spectacular results, while the British policy is generally speaking long-term and plodding.” He pointed out the dangers of the strategy carried out by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, which relied on blowing up weapons depots, cutting telephone lines, and land-mining enemy supply lines. The Americans had more money than brains, he warned, and the OSS’s “hankering after playing cowboys and red Indians” could only lead to
trouble for the alliance
.

Dearlove had grown up in the classic British spying tradition. He graduated from Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, a traditional recruiting ground for the British secret services, and had served in foreign postings in Africa, Europe, and Washington. Like his predecessors, as the head of MI6 he signed all internal memos with his code name, “C”—by tradition, always in green ink.

Shortly after his plane, carrying the call sign ASCOT-1, landed in Washington, Dearlove found himself inside the Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters. On a large screen, CIA officers were watching video of a white Mitsubishi truck driving along a road in Afghanistan. Dearlove had known that the United States had developed the ability to wage war by remote control, but he had never before watched the Predator drone in action.

Several minutes went by as the Mitsubishi was framed by the crosshairs at the center of the video monitor, until a missile blast washed the entire screen in white. Seconds later, the picture clarified to show the wreckage of the truck,
twisted and burning
.

Dearlove turned to a group of CIA officers, including Ross Newland, an agency veteran who months earlier had taken a job as part of a group overseeing the Predator program. He cracked a wry smile.

“It almost isn’t sporting, is it?”

1:
PERMISSION TO KILL

“
You are there to kill terrorists
, not make enemies.”

—Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, September 14, 2001

T
he lights in the White House Situation Room dimmed, and the CIA men began the slide show.

The pictures had been taken in haste and were grainy and out of focus. Some were of men getting into a car, or walking down the street. The scene in the darkened room resembled a mafia movie, where FBI officers sip coffee and scroll through photographs of mob kingpins. In this case, however, the images were of men who the Central Intelligence Agency was proposing to kill.

Gathered around the table were all the vice president’s men, including legal adviser David Addington and chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, an old Washington hand known as “Scooter.” At the head of the table, Vice President Dick Cheney watched the rogues gallery of slides with intense interest. It was a cold, late-fall day in 2001, just weeks after President George W. Bush had signed a secret order giving the CIA power it had lost in the 1970s, after a series of grisly and sometimes comic revelations about CIA assassination attempts had led the White House to ban the spy agency from exterminating America’s enemies. On that day in the Situation Room, the CIA was reporting back to the White House on how it intended to use its newly acquired
license to kill
.

The two CIA officers leading the presentation, Jose Rodriguez and Enrique Prado, told the group that the Counterterrorist Center was recruiting CIA officers for a highly classified new program: a project to insert small teams of assassins into other countries to hunt down and kill the people that the Bush administration had marked for death. Among the photographs was one of Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian who the CIA believed had helped organize the September 11 attacks and was living in the open in Germany. There was also a picture of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a hero in Pakistan for his work developing its atomic bomb but a villain in the West for secretly transferring nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and other pariah states. By shooting each photograph at close range, the CIA was making an eerie, unmistakable point: We can get close enough to take their pictures, so we can get close enough to kill.

But behind the bravado were unanswered questions. How would CIA hit squads slip unnoticed into Germany, Pakistan, and other countries? Could a group of American assassins really set up a net of surveillance and then, at the appointed time, manage to put a bullet into the head of their target? The agency had figured out none of the logistics, but Rodriguez and Prado had not come to the White House prepared to answer detailed questions about the operations. They were just looking for permission.

Cheney told them to get to work.

—

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH,
the son of a former director of central intelligence
*
for whom the agency had renamed its headquarters in Langley, inherited a shrunken and dispirited spy service, a shade of what it had been during the Cold War. But in the final months of 2001, Bush had put the CIA in charge of a global manhunt, and its performance had buffed up the agency’s image of itself as nimble and responsive to the demands of the commander-in-chief—the antithesis of the lumbering, bureaucratic Pentagon.

The CIA was now running a secret war at the direction of the White House, and the agency’s once ignored Counterterrorist Center had become the war’s frantic command post. The center had once been a backwater within the CIA, viewed by many at Langley as a collection of odd zealots who had ended up there after failing at more prestigious assignments. But after the September 11 attacks the Counterterrorist Center began the most dramatic expansion in its history, and over the course of a decade it would become the CIA’s beating heart.