The Way of the Knife (32 page)

Raise your voices . . . Take a stand!

Reclaim our honor and our land

From foreign powers and meddling hands.

Brothers and sisters, take a stand!

Raise your voices . . . Take a stand!

From regional strings . . . international bans.

Brother, come with me . . . man for man.

Brothers and sisters . . . take a stand!

Ballarin believed that the great awakening should begin in Somalia, where she had already had contacts with Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a (ASWJ), a Sufi group that controls large swaths of territory in central Somalia. The ASWJ had a somewhat checkered history. During the Somali civil war that raged during the 1990s, the group was aligned with the same warlord who commanded the Somali gunmen fighting Army Rangers and Delta Force operatives during the Black Hawk Down episode. Before the rise of al Shabaab, the ASWJ had not wielded significant influence in Somalia’s clan wars. But as al Shabaab fighters began capturing towns in southern and central Somalia, the Wahhabi gunmen made a point of destroying Sufi graves and mosques wherever they went. Bones were exhumed and left to bleach in the sun, and caretakers of graveyards were arrested or told never to return to work. Al Shabaab fighters said that the gravesites were overwrought memorials—idolatry that was banned by Islam. Sheikh Hassan Yaqub Ali, the al Shabaab spokesman in the southern port city of Kismayo, told the BBC, “
It is forbidden to make graves into shrines
.”

The grave desecration ignited a militant strain within the largely peaceful ASWJ, and they began to mobilize into an armed group with the aim of acting as a counterweight to al Shabaab. Recognizing the potential of a Sufi armed awakening, Ballarin began encouraging Sufi leaders to develop a strategy to break al Shabaab’s advance. She and Perry Davis spoke repeatedly with Sufi sheikhs and ASWJ military leaders, traveling to central Somalia to talk about their military campaign, acting like a two-person battlefield staff. Ballarin and Davis boasted to Americans that the ASWJ was like their own private militia, and that they had instructed the Sufi fighters in how to recover weapons off the battlefield and store ammunition.

Then, after months of stalemate, ragtag columns of gun-wielding ASWJ fighters moved into El Buur, an al Shabaab stronghold in central Somalia. Ballarin beams when she recalls a text message she said she received in the middle of the night from ASWJ commanders:

“We’ve taken El Buur!”

—

SITTING IN FRONT OF
the television in her brick mansion in Northern Virginia in 2011, watching video feeds on Fox News of the Arab revolts across North Africa, Michele Ballarin didn’t see a hopeful Arab “spring.” She saw a nightmare unfolding: radical Wahhabi Islam cutting across northern Africa all the way to the west coast of the continent. In her mind, authoritarian governments in places like Egypt and Libya had been a bulwark against the spread of Wahhabism, and the fortifications were now crumbling. She was certain that Wahhabism’s rich patrons in Saudi Arabia would move into the region with money to build mosques and religious schools, and that the United States was losing its only partners in a fight against radical Islam. As she saw it, Muammar Gaddafi might have been a ruthless thug and the enemy of her hero Ronald Reagan, but to her, the Libyan dictator had come to be on the side of the righteous in
the age’s defining struggle of good versus evil
.

Like a desert sandstorm, the popular revolts spreading across the states of North Africa were in the process of burying decades of authoritarian rule. But they had also caught the CIA flat-footed, and White House officials were aware that for all of the billions of dollars that the United States spends each year to collect intelligence and forecast the world’s cataclysmic events, American spy agencies were several steps behind the popular uprisings. “The CIA missed Tunisia. They missed Egypt. They missed Libya. They missed them individually, and they missed them collectively,” said one senior member of the Obama administration. In the frantic weeks after the Arab revolts began, hundreds of intelligence analysts at the CIA and other American spy agencies were reassigned to divine meaning from the turmoil.
It was a game of catch-up
.

It was the first mass uprising of the social-media age, and the revolutions were playing out in Twitter messages and Facebook updates. It was unlike anything that officials at Langley had seen before, and historical precursors like the fall of Communism were of little help to CIA leaders as they struggled to advise the White House and State Department about which Arab dictator was likely to fall next. At one senior staff meeting, CIA director Leon Panetta pressed his aides to make sense of the blizzard of digital messages. “Isn’t anyone able to capture all of these messages in one place?” he asked, clearly puzzled by the ways of the younger generation.

But the problem went deeper for the CIA, a spy agency that very quickly was coming to experience the downside of its reorientation toward counterterrorism. The CIA was founded in 1947 on the premise that presidents and policy makers needed advance warning about the dynamics shaping world events, but both President George W. Bush and Barack Obama had decided that hunting and killing terrorists should be the agency’s top priority. The agency didn’t have enough spies doing actual spying, not enough case officers on the ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose job it was to collect intelligence about ferment in the streets or about fears among foreign leaders that they might be losing their grip on power.

The CIA had allied itself with ruthless intelligence services throughout the Middle East and North Africa, forming partnerships with foreign spy services run by the likes of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. These partnerships had helped the CIA amass scalps for the war on terror. CIA directors were on a first-name basis with Moussa Koussa, the head of Gaddafi’s brutal spy service, and American and Libyan spies had worked together to hunt down men with suspected ties to al Qaeda, capture them, and put them in Libya’s notorious Abu Salim jail. After Gaddafi fell and rebels sacked Libyan intelligence headquarters, troves of documents were found detailing the close ties between American and Libyan intelligence. There was even a letter to Moussa Koussa from Porter Goss, the former CIA director,
thanking the Libyan spymaster
for his Christmas gift of fresh oranges.

Therein lay much of the problem: Libyan or Egyptian spies were hardly about to be candid with American officials about the fragility of their own governments. And they kept close watch on dissident leaders, making it difficult for CIA case officers in cities like Cairo to meet with opposition groups and collect intelligence about domestic unrest in the North African states. Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, would later admit that the agency’s decision to tie itself to authoritarian regimes in the Arab world had crippled its ability to collect political and social intelligence in those countries. As he put it, “How much do you want to push collection on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt if you’re going to alienate [Mubarak’s intelligence chief] Omar Suleiman and he stops being a good counterterrorism partner for you?”

Government leaders from around the world hailed the end of North Africa’s calcified dictatorships. But for sleep-deprived, often neurotic officers inside the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the events of early 2011 were hardly the cause for optimism. It wasn’t just that they were watching their close foreign allies be unceremoniously pushed from power. Even more worrying was that Islamist groups that for decades had been under the heel of dictators—from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to radical groups in Libya that the CIA and Libyan intelligence had worked together to snuff out—were gaining political power. The whirlwind taking place in the Arab world could, the CTC feared, sow the seeds for a resurgence of al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Such was the heartening prospect of al Qaeda’s leader, holed up inside the top floor of a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Furiously writing letters to his subordinates during what would be the final weeks of his life, Osama bin Laden was making a case in the early months of 2011 that the Arab revolts were the realization of a vision he first laid out in the 1990s, when he founded al Qaeda. In fact, the revolts had played out nothing like he had predicted, and the governments in Egypt and Tunisia had been toppled not by al Qaeda or by those seeking a pan-Muslim caliphate but by a youthful grassroots effort using media technology to further the revolution.

But bin Laden still found hope in the chaos. He wrote gleefully to one of his deputies that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had expressed worries that “the region will fall into the hands of the armed Islamists.” What the world was witnessing in “these days of consecutive revolutions,” he wrote, “is a great and glorious event” that would likely “
encompass the majority of the Islamic world
with the will of Allah.”

14:
THE UNRAVELING

“It was the Americans!

It was Blackwater!

It was another Raymond Davis!”

—Hafiz Muhammad Saeed

T
he American spy sat for weeks inside a dark cell at Kot Lakhpat prison, on the industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with an unsavory reputation for inmates dying under murky circumstances. He had been separated from the rest of the prisoners, held in a section of the decaying facility where the guards didn’t carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American officials had managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States consulate in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of dogs was tasting Raymond Davis’s food,
checking that it had not been
laced with poison.

For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell seemed the first solid proof of their suspicions that the CIA had built up a small army inside Pakistan, a group of trigger-happy cowboys carrying out a range of nefarious activities. For the CIA, the disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–September 11 phenomenon: how the CIA had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors and others with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world.

The third child of a poor bricklayer and a cook, Raymond Allen Davis grew up in a small clapboard house in the Strawberry Patch hamlet of Big Stone Gap, a town of six thousand people in Virginia coal country
named for the gap
in the mountains where the Powell River sluiced through. Shy and reserved, Davis was unusually strong and became a football and wrestling star at the local high school. After graduating, in 1993, he enlisted in the Army infantry and did a tour in Macedonia in 1994 as a United Nations peacekeeper. When his five-year hitch in the infantry was up, in 1998, he reenlisted, this time in the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg. He left the Army in 2003 and, like hundreds of other retired Navy SEALs and Green Berets, was hired by Erik Prince’s company, Blackwater USA, and soon found himself in Iraq working as a security guard for the CIA.

Little is known about his work for Blackwater, but by 2006 he had left the firm and, together with his wife, founded a private security company in Las Vegas. Soon he was hired by the CIA as a private contractor, what the agency calls a “Green Badge,” for the color of the identification cards that contractors show to enter CIA headquarters at Langley. Like Davis, many of the contractors were hired to fill out the CIA’s Global Response Staff—bodyguards who traveled to war zones to protect case officers, assess the security of potential meeting spots, even make initial contact with sources to make sure that case officers wouldn’t be walking into an ambush. It was officers from the CIA’s security branch who would come under withering fire the following year on the roof of the agency’s base in Benghazi, Libya. The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had so stretched the CIA’s own cadre of security officers that the agency was forced to pay inflated sums to private contractors to do the security jobs. When Davis first deployed with the CIA to Pakistan in 2008, he worked from the CIA base in Peshawar,
earning upward of
two hundred thousand dollars per year, including benefits and expenses.

Davis had already been in jail for several weeks by mid-February 2011, and it was unlikely he would be freed anytime soon. The murder case had inflamed anti-American passions inside Pakistan, with street protests and purple newspaper editorials demanding that Pakistan’s government not cave to Washington’s demands for Davis’s release and instead sentence him to death. The evidence at the time indicated that the men Davis had killed had carried out a string of petty thefts that day, but there was an added problem: a third man killed by the unmarked American SUV fleeing the scene.

Making matters even worse for Davis, the American had been imprisoned in Lahore, where the family of Nawaz Sharif dominated the political culture. The former president made no secret about his intentions to once again run Pakistan, making him the chief antagonist to President Asif Ali Zardari and his political machine in Islamabad, 250 miles away. As the American embassy in Islamabad leaned on Zardari’s government to get Davis released from jail, the diplomats soon realized that Zardari had little influence over the police officers and judges in the city of the president’s bitter rival.

But the most significant factor ensuring that Davis would languish in jail was that the Obama administration had yet to tell Pakistan’s government what it already suspected, and what Raymond Davis’s marksmanship in the Lahore traffic circle made clear: He wasn’t just another paper-shuffling American diplomat. Davis’s work in Pakistan was much darker, and involved probing an exposed nerve in the already hypersensitive relationship between the CIA and the ISI.