The Way of the Knife (29 page)

When President Obama’s top advisers gathered at the White House to discuss the covert-action programs, Blair passed around the list. He and Gates had hoped to turn the meeting into a forum to discuss the general wisdom of CIA covert action, and the meeting dragged on for hours as Blair tried to force a debate about each secret program. Blair recalled that “the CIA had wanted to just push [covert-action] programs through,” and with each pointed question that Blair asked, both
Leon Panetta and Deputy National Security Advisor
Tom Donilon grew angrier.

It wasn’t just that Panetta thought that Blair was grandstanding; he thought that he was attempting to take from the CIA what the spy agency had guarded jealously since its 1947 founding—a direct line to the president for getting covert actions approved. Panetta believed that the list that Blair and Gates had assembled put unnecessary restrictions on President Obama’s ability to authorize secret operations.

Blair’s efforts failed, and the Obama administration approved every one of the covert-action programs that had been handed down by President Bush. The CIA had secured yet another victory, and Blair’s standing inside the White House was permanently crippled.

Even as the Obama administration discussed the future of the CIA’s covert-action programs, there was no thought about ending the targeted-killing efforts. Quite the opposite. In the early months of the administration, National Security Advisor James Jones led a project to compile a centralized “kill list” for lethal operations beyond declared war zones. What came to be known as the Jones Memo was an early attempt by the Obama administration to establish procedures for the conduct of
a secret war that most believed
would last years beyond President Obama’s time in the White House. The list was maintained by the National Security Council, and as much as some officials tried to keep strict criteria about who could be added to the kill list, those criteria were sometimes eased.

At the start of the Obama administration, for instance, the CIA was not authorized to kill Baitullah Mehsud, who had emerged as the undisputed leader of the Pakistani Taliban since the days when Art Keller first heard his name while serving at one of the agency’s bases in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Taliban, known inside the country as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), was attacking Pakistani military installations and government facilities in a grisly spasm of violence. Pakistan’s civilian government, which came to power after President Musharraf stepped aside, began pressing the Obama administration to kill Mehsud with an armed drone, just as the CIA had killed his predecessor, Nek Muhammad. But the answer was no. During one private meeting in early 2009, CIA deputy director Stephen Kappes told Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, that since Mehsud and his followers had not attacked the United States,
the CIA couldn’t get legal approval to kill him
.

Some conspiracy theorists in Pakistan had a more cynical view of why the United States was refusing to kill Mehsud: that he was in fact a secret agent of India, and the United States had promised New Delhi that Mehsud would not be harmed. But as the Pakistanis continued to press, CIA lawyers began circulating legal memos making a case that since the Pakistani Taliban sheltered al Qaeda operatives, and since it was increasingly difficult to distinguish between groups bent on attacking inside Pakistan and those focused on hitting the West, senior TTP leaders could justifiably be put on the kill list. Besides the legal rationale, some thought there could be diplomatic benefits if the CIA were to kill Pakistan’s most dangerous enemy.

On a warm evening in early August 2009, a CIA drone hovering over the village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan, trained its camera on a rooftop where Baitullah Mehsud and several members of his family were taking in the night air. Mehsud, a diabetic, was receiving an intravenous insulin drip when the drone launched a missile that killed everyone on the roof. Pakistani officials cheered the killing, and some in Washington described the drone strike as a “goodwill kill.”

Leon Panetta had taken to his new role as military commander, and his time at Langley would be known for the CIA’s aggressive—some would come to believe reckless—campaign of targeted killings. At the end of his CIA tenure, Panetta, a devout Catholic, joked that he had “
said more Hail Marys
in the last two years than I have in my whole life.”

Two months after Baitullah Mehsud’s killing, Leon Panetta arrived at the White House with a long list of requests for CIA paramilitary operations. He sought more armed drones and approval to ask Pakistan’s permission for the drones to fly over larger swaths of the tribal areas, what the CIA called “flight boxes.” President Obama, at the urging of Vice President Joe Biden, had already agreed to increase the number of covert officers inside Pakistan, many of whom were operating in the country without the knowledge of the ISI.

The CIA requests to expand its drone fleet did raise eyebrows, and some officials openly questioned why a spy agency was moving so far from its primary mission of collecting and analyzing intelligence. General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked on several occasions, “
Can you tell me
why we are building a second Air Force?” Others thought that the CIA had become so enamored of its killer drones that it wasn’t pushing its analysts to ask a basic question: To what extent might the drone strikes be creating more terrorists than they are actually killing? But by the end of the meeting in the Situation Room, President Obama had granted every one of Panetta’s requests. “
The CIA gets what it wants
,” the president said.

—

BUT EVEN WITH
the new resources, the CIA’s war in the mountains of Pakistan still consumed the bulk of the intelligence community’s drones, spy satellites, and case officers. That left little for a different war, three thousand miles to the west, that President Obama’s advisers were quietly expanding. The assassination attempt on Prince bin Nayef in August 2009 created a new urgency in Washington to take on the al Qaeda–affiliated group in Yemen that had announced its intentions to strike at the West.

In late 2009, there was only a small cluster of American soldiers and spies stationed inside the U.S. embassy in Sana’a. In addition to the CIA’s station in the country, the Pentagon had kept a group of special-operations troops in Yemen since 2002, but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had for years been a higher priority than the mission in Yemen. But with the Iraq war now winding down, Joint Special Operations Command had more Navy SEALs to devote to new missions.

General David Petraeus, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, had been worried about the growing influence of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
since he assumed control
of U.S. Central Command the previous year. In late September 2009, Petraeus signed off on the classified order to expand American military spying in Yemen and elsewhere, the same order that Michael Furlong had used to justify his intelligence-gathering operation in Pakistan. It authorized the military to conduct a host of unconventional missions in Yemen, from broader eavesdropping activities to paying off locals for information.

Admiral William McRaven, the JSOC commander, wanted to use in Yemen the same blueprint that commandos had used in Iraq to fight al Qaeda in Mesopotamia: frequent night raids to capture al Qaeda operatives, interrogate them for intelligence, and then use the information to carry out more snatch-and-grab operations. This model, relying on what commanders called the “cycle of intelligence,” was already being duplicated in Afghanistan, and McRaven thought that getting more troops into Yemen could cripple AQAP’s strength
before it could successfully
attack the United States.

But McRaven’s ambitious ideas for Yemen were rejected in Washington as unrealistic. President Saleh, of Yemen, would never allow American ground troops to set up a detention-and-interrogation center inside Yemen, let alone permit capture-and-kill operations throughout the country. The White House had already run into fierce political opposition to its plans to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the president’s aides hardly relished the prospect of taking on a slew of new detainees picked up in Yemen. McRaven was told he needed to figure out a different way to wage war in Yemen.

What followed was a strange, half-baked campaign: a quasisecret war undermined by sometimes absurd attempts to hide the American hand in military operations. With little precise intelligence about the whereabouts of militant leaders, and the Yemeni president’s refusal since 2002 to permit armed drones, war planners were forced to rely on cruise missiles fired from Navy ships off Yemen’s coast and occasional bombing runs by Marine Harrier jets. The results were unsightly, and over the next several months the American strikes in Yemen would claim more civilian casualties than senior operatives affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The first American strike came on December 17, 2009. The Americans had intercepted communications from a terrorist camp in Abyan province, a remote expanse of desert and coastal villages running south to the port city of Aden. AQAP was in the final stages of sending a group of suicide bombers to attack the U.S. embassy in Sana’a. In a video teleconference a day earlier, Admiral McRaven gave a detailed briefing to White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials about his plan to hit the camp. While the CIA generally had blanket approval to carry out drone strikes in Pakistan without getting White House permission, the military required a green light from a small team in Washington—a group nicknamed the “Counterterrorism Board of Directors,”
with John Brennan serving
as chairman. The group would decide on a plan and then take its recommendation to President Obama, who personally signed off on each strike.

Obama approved the operation. The next day, a coded message went out to a small fleet of American ships patrolling the Arabian Sea, and within hours several Tomahawk cruise missiles slammed into the desert camp in Abyan. By the end of the day, Yemen’s government had put out a press release hailing the success of the operation, saying that a strike by Yemen’s air force had killed “around 34” al Qaeda fighters.

The following day, President Obama called Ali Abdullah Saleh to thank him for his cooperation, even though Yemeni troops had merely been a fig leaf for the American operation. Videos taken by locals at the camp revealed missile fragments with American markings and also proved that the Tomahawk missiles had been topped with cluster bombs—weapons designed to cut a wide path of destruction by dispersing smaller munitions over a wide area. Most of the dead were civilians, and bloody images of dead women and children went viral on YouTube. During a street protest after the strike, broadcast on Al Jazeera, one al Qaeda fighter shouldering an AK-47 made a direct appeal to Yemeni troops.

“Soldiers, you should know we do not want to fight you,” he said. “There is no problem between you and us. The problem is between America and its agents.
Beware of taking the side of America
!”

—

THREE WEEKS AFTER
the American strike, General Petraeus arrived in Sana’a to meet with President Saleh and his advisers about the next phase of the war. There was new urgency: On Christmas Day 2009, a young Nigerian man boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit, and sewn into his underwear was the latest diabolical creation of Ibrahim al-Asiri, the master bomb maker of Yemen. As the plane made its final descent, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to set off the bomb—made with eighty grams of plastic explosives—using a syringe filled with liquid acid. Once again, Asiri’s work was undone by the incompetence of his bomb carrier. Abdulmutallab set only his leg on fire, and other passengers quickly wrestled him to the ground. The hapless terrorist was taken into custody in Detroit, and the United States only narrowly averted its first large-scale terrorist incident of the Obama administration.

While the assassination attempt on Prince bin Nayef had been the first sign of AQAP’s ambitions to strike beyond Yemen, the thwarted Christmas attack proved that the group was truly committed to continuing the work begun by Osama bin Laden and his now diminished band of al Qaeda operatives hiding in Pakistan. When General Petraeus’s plane touched down in Yemen’s capital in early January 2010, the Obama administration had already decided to escalate the American strikes in the country.

President Saleh had long been prickly about allowing Yemen to become a playground for secret American operations, so meetings between the Yemeni president and American officials often degenerated into horse-trading sessions. Petraeus began the ninety-minute meeting by softening up the Yemeni president: He praised him for his military’s successful operations against AQAP and said that he had requested that cash payments to Yemen for counterterrorism operations nearly double,
from $67 million to $105 million
annually.

But the wily autocrat pushed for more. Raising the subject of the recent American airstrikes, Saleh said that “mistakes were made” in the killing of civilians in Abyan. Tomahawk cruise missiles were ill suited for a fight against terrorists, and civilian casualties could be averted if only the United States would give him a dozen helicopter gunships to swoop into terrorist camps. This, Saleh said, would allow him to spare the innocent and kill the guilty. If Washington wouldn’t bless this request, Saleh said, maybe General Petraeus could pressure Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to contribute six helicopters each. Petraeus countered with a request of his own: Allow American special-operations troops and spies closer to the front lines in Yemen. That way, Petraeus said, Americans could download intelligence feeds from drone aircraft and satellites and use the intelligence to hit terrorist hideouts with greater speed and precision.

Saleh flatly rejected the request and told Petraeus that the Americans must stay inside an operations center that the CIA and JSOC had recently set up just outside of the capital city. But, he said, the air war could continue. He would allow American jets and bombers to loiter offshore and come into Yemeni airspace for specific missions if intelligence emerged about the whereabouts of AQAP leaders. He said he would keep up the ruse that the United States was not at war inside Yemen.