The Way of the Knife (20 page)

The occupation by the hated Ethiopian troops turned into a recruiting bonanza for al Shabaab, and the group grew in strength. Insurgents planted roadside bombs and used other guerrilla tactics that militants in Iraq and Afghanistan had used with great success. Foreign fighters flooded into Somalia. Jihadi internet sites invoked the name Abu-Raghal, an infamous traitor in the Muslim faith who had helped the Ethiopian army march on Mecca. The fighters came from Morocco and from Algeria.

And they came from Minnesota. Not long after the Ethiopian invasion, twenty American students from the Little Mogadishu neighborhood of Minneapolis boarded planes and went to Somalia to wage jihad against the Christian invaders. Among them was Shirwa Ahmed, a community-college dropout who loved basketball and spent most of his days doing odd jobs and memorizing the lyrics to rap songs. He had become so enraged by the arrival of the Ethiopians in Somalia that he made his way to the Horn of Africa, where he joined al Shabaab.

In October of the following year, he drove a car packed with explosives into a government building in Puntland, a region of northern Somalia.

He was the first-ever American suicide bomber.

9:
THE BASE

“In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay?”

—T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

I
t didn’t take long for Art Keller to learn what had become the first rule for CIA officers serving in Pakistan: Each day you spend in the country, you know less than you did the day before. By the time your tour of duty is up, you know nothing.

By the middle of 2006, when Keller’s helicopter touched down at the CIA base near Wana, in the tribal agency of South Waziristan, intelligence operations in Pakistan had become the twenty-first-century version of James Jesus Angleton’s “wilderness of mirrors.” Angleton, the legendary and ruthless former chief of counterintelligence at the CIA, had paraphrased his beloved T. S. Eliot to describe the deceptions, double crosses, and divided loyalties of Cold War espionage. Decades later, the spy games in Pakistan were no less maddening to play.

The boyish-looking Keller was an unlikely candidate to be dropped into the middle of the Pakistani mountains at a time when al Qaeda was turning the area into its new base of operations. He had never stepped foot in Pakistan before, spoke none of the local languages, and his expertise—in Iran’s missile program—wasn’t about to do him much good in Wana. But with the Iraq war taking CIA case officers with any Middle Eastern experience away from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the clandestine service was desperate for bodies. So Art Keller volunteered for Afghanistan. He was assigned to Pakistan.

“
The ideal person
you want sitting in the base there was someone who could speak Dari or Urdu or Pashto, with years of experience, and knows the target,” he said.

“Instead, you get me.”

Keller had joined the CIA in 1999 after a decade of meanderings through the military, college, and journalism. He had graduated high school with an interest in international affairs but without a clear idea about what he wanted to do in life, and joined the Army in the early 1990s because he was fairly certain it would be a risk-free way to earn money for college. “
Eighteen months later
,” he said, “I’m sitting in the middle of the desert wondering, ‘How did I end up here?’”

He played only a bit part in Operation Desert Storm, which swiftly expelled Iraqi troops from Kuwait. He had been assigned to a parachute-rigging company, but with no airborne operations during the war there was no need for the group’s work. On the eve of the fighting, his unit was driven into the middle of the Saudi desert and told to guard a logistics base used to supply the American tank invasion into Iraq.

After leaving the Army, he attended the University of Northern Arizona and decided he should either become a reporter or join the CIA. He took a job in the sports department of
The
Arizona Republic,
and just as he was about to be transferred to the political desk, the CIA contacted him and told him that his application had been accepted.

He drew an assignment in the agency’s Counterproliferation division, working to halt the spread of mass casualty weapons, and his first overseas posting was to Vienna, where the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency was located. Officers at the CIA’s Vienna Station were expected to develop sources inside the IAEA to learn about its secret deliberations. But after the September 11 attacks, the CIA was also feeding the IAEA some of its most sensitive intelligence in order to get the international body to sanction regimes like those of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.

Keller had developed an intimate understanding of Tehran’s efforts to develop ballistic missiles, but at that time Iran was not at the top of the CIA’s list of worries. In late summer 2002, Keller’s boss in Vienna returned from a trip to Langley and approached a group of officers inside the agency’s station.

“You know how there’s been rumors about maybe there being an invasion and a war with Iraq?” Keller remembered him asking. “You’re gonna hear some funny things coming out of headquarters because they’re under incredible pressure to find evidence to justify this,” he said.

“You know that scene in
Das Boot
when they’re at the bottom of the ocean and the rivets are popping out of the submarine and shooting around inside?” Keller’s boss asked. “That’s what’s going on at headquarters right now.”

Keller would do two brief stints in Iraq after the ill-fated invasion, one of them as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led team of weapons-hunters who spent 2003 and 2004 patrolling desert sites for Saddam Hussein’s phantom chemical- and biological-weapons programs. Early on, Keller could tell that the effort was pointless: Iraqi scientists who had every reason to show the Americans the weapons stockpiles—and be rewarded by the CIA with cash and possibly resettlement—insisted to the survey group that the weapons didn’t exist. But Keller and other officers would interview the same scientists two or three times, allowing Langley to pad the numbers about how many interviews the survey conducted. This also allowed President Bush and Vice President Cheney to say publicly that the weapons hunt in Iraq was still going on.

The dusty CIA base in South Waziristan where Keller arrived in 2006 was in the same town that Pakistani troops had hit with artillery and gunships during their battle with Nek Muhammad’s fighters in 2004, and near the madrassa in Shakai where government troops had agreed to a cease-fire with the Waziri tribesmen. When Keller got there, another fragile peace deal was in place. This one had been negotiated by Pakistani troops and Baitullah Mehsud, another young guerrilla leader who had picked up the bloody banner when Nek Muhammad was killed in the 2004 CIA drone strike. Mehsud had never honored the terms of the agreement and had merely used the cease-fire to consolidate power in South Waziristan and plan hit-and-run attacks on Pakistani troops. But Pakistan’s military leadership in 2006 did not want another battle in the tribal areas, so when Art Keller arrived in Wana there was little appetite among Pakistani soldiers and spies to kick a hornet’s nest.

As a result, relations between CIA officers and the local ISI operatives in South Waziristan were dismal. When he landed at Wana, Keller learned just how bad they were when he was briefed by the man he would be replacing, a salty older officer named Gene. Gene told Keller that Pakistani troops were doing few patrols and spending nearly all of their days inside protected barracks. No matter how hard he pushed, Gene said, the Pakistani military and spies did not want to challenge the power of the ministate that Baitullah Mehsud was building in South Waziristan.

Mehsud, unlike Nek Muhammad, was no media hound. He gave few interviews and, following traditions of strict Islam, refused to be photographed. He had barely any education, not even significant time at a madrassa, but in 2006 he commanded a fiercely loyal band of some five thousand tribal gunmen. He brooked no dissent and had deserters hunted down and killed. There were even suspicions he had arranged for Pakistani troops to help capture his former mentor, Abdullah Mehsud, a one-legged fighter whom the United States had released from Guantánamo Bay in 2004, so Baitullah could take power in South Waziristan. When Pakistani troops surrounded Abdullah’s home in Balochistan,
he held a grenade up
to his chest and pulled the pin.

Baitullah Mehsud’s power and influence would expand dramatically when a collection of smaller military groups joined together under the name of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), known commonly as the Pakistani Taliban, with Mehsud as the group’s leader
.
Unlike the Afghan Taliban, under the control of Mullah Omar and enjoying the quiet patronage of the ISI, the new group intended to drive the Pakistani soldiers and spies out of the tribal areas using suicide bombings in Islamabad, Karachi, and other cities as bloody calling cards. They called it “defensive jihad,” a struggle to protect the tribal way of life from Pakistani military forces, whom they viewed as foreigners in their lands.

The group had few contacts or supporters beyond the tribal regions, but in Wana in 2006 it was clear who was in charge. Baitullah Mehsud’s followers had been administering rough justice throughout South Waziristan, roaming around assassinating any tribal chiefs suspected of working with the Americans or the Pakistani government. Thieves were hanged in the village streets, adulterers were stoned, and vendors in the Wana bazaar openly sold gruesome DVDs in Urdu depicting the beheading of Pakistani army scouts. The snuff films were part propaganda and part intimidation, a blunt message that the military should stay in their barracks and cede control to the tribes. Baitullah Mehsud forced barbers in Wana to post signs in their shops saying that since facial grooming is forbidden under sharia law, beard trimming services were not available. Barbers who refused watched their shops burn down. Other evidence of militant control was more prosaic: Keller’s base received supplies of fuel just once every two weeks, on the specific days the militants allowed the Pakistani army trucks to use the roads.

The CIA outpost was a brick compound inside a larger Pakistani military base near Wana. A small detachment of Pakistani special-operations troops guarded the American buildings, but Keller soon figured out that the troops were more jailers than protectors, because the CIA officers were never allowed off base. Inside the compound was a small cluster of rooms where the Americans ate, slept, and communicated with their bosses using secure radios and computers to keep the ISI from intercepting their transmissions. The small base reeked of raw sewage from plumbing leaks, and a barrage of plaster chips from the ceiling would often cover the beds, dishes, and communications equipment. Gene had once tried to persuade the CIA station in Islamabad to put up money for a squash court at the base. Given the popularity of squash within the ranks of Pakistan’s military, he argued, the court might help the CIA officers built a rapport with their counterparts. The request was denied.

Keller’s own relations with his main ISI counterpart were sour from the beginning, in no small part because of a prank that Gene played before he left South Waziristan. On the day of his helicopter flight out of Wana, Gene handed Keller a note scribbled in Urdu and told him to give it to the ISI officer during their first meeting. Keller had no idea what the message said, but he dutifully passed it along during the meeting. The ISI man, a member of the Khattak tribe, was not particularly amused. He translated the note for Keller.

“You can never trust a fucking Khattak,” the note read.

“Gene thought that was hilarious,” said Keller. “Thanks a lot, Gene.”

—

GIVEN THE ACCUMULATING MISTRUST
between the Americans and Pakistanis in Wana, most of the intelligence gathering that Keller oversaw during his time in South Waziristan occurred without the ISI’s approval. Gene had passed along the names and contact information of the Pakistani agents that the CIA had cultivated in the region—a network that was now in Keller’s hands to run. But for a white American spy in Wana, running a network of Pakistani agents without tipping off the ISI was not easy. The agents couldn’t come on the CIA base or they would be spotted and arrested by the ISI, and any attempt by Keller to meet them off the base would also put them at risk.

By contrast, CIA officers working from the other side of the border in Afghanistan had a much easier time. By 2006, the agency had set up a string of small bases in eastern Afghanistan, in towns like Khost and Asadabad, from which agents were sent over the border into Pakistan to collect information in the tribal areas. The Americans could meet the agents at the base or in neighboring towns. The CIA started sending “targeting analysts” from Langley to the firebases in Afghanistan, charged with sifting through human source information gathered in the hinterlands and fusing it with intelligence gleaned from satellites or listening posts to try to pin down the locations of militants in Bajaur and Waziristan. Three years later, a meeting with a man the CIA believed was a high-level agent but in fact was working for the militants went horribly wrong at one of the bases, Camp Chapman, in Khost. Seven CIA employees were killed when the agent, a Jordanian doctor, detonated a suicide vest. It was the agency’s deadliest day since the attack on the United States embassy in Beirut in 1983.

Without the option of meetings, Keller kept in touch with his primary agent entirely through computer communications, and he maintained an elaborate network of go-betweens, without any face-to-face contact with his sources during his months in South Waziristan. He compared the experience to that of Western reporters in Baghdad during the darkest days of the Iraq war: Unable to move freely through the streets, they relied on Iraqi stringers to gather information and quotes.