The Way of the Knife (40 page)

Unable to hold their positions any longer, the CIA operatives and State Department security officers evacuated the diplomatic compound and drove to the CIA base a mile away. But not long after they arrived, the CIA base came under a barrage of fire from AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. It wasn’t until 5
A.M.
when a group of American reinforcements arrived from Tripoli and joined the CIA operatives on the roof of the base. By then the attackers were preparing to stage another assault, and mortar shells began exploding on the roof. CIA operatives Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, both former Navy SEALs, were killed. By dawn the Americans had evacuated the CIA base and were driving to the airport, the Predator keeping watch over the convoy from the sky. All American personnel, together with the bodies of the four people killed during the assault, were flown to Tripoli. U.S. operations in Benghazi, which had been the CIA’s primary base for gathering intelligence in Libya, were shut down.

—

THE ATTACK HAD,
quite literally, blinded the CIA inside Libya. And, with the agency’s decade-long pivot toward paramilitary operations, there is concern among the ranks of both current and former spies that the agency might be blind in too many other places as well, for a different reason. The CIA’s closed society has fundamentally changed, and a generation of CIA officers is now socialized in war. Just as a generation earlier Ross Newland and his training class had been told that the spy agency should eschew killing at all costs, many CIA officers who joined the agency since September 11, 2001, have experienced
only
man hunting and killing. This new generation has felt more of the adrenaline rush of being at the front lines than the patient, “gentle” work of intelligence gathering and espionage. The latter can be tedious, even boring, and as one former top CIA officer put it, “How are you going to keep these people on the farm now that they’ve seen the bright lights of the city?”

Some senior CIA officials speak with pride about how the drone strikes in Pakistan have decimated al Qaeda, forcing the dwindling band of Osama bin Laden’s followers to find new places to hide—in Yemen or North Africa or Somalia or some other ungoverned part of the world. Many believe that the drone program is the most effective covert-action program in CIA history.

But in the killing years since 2001, some of those who were present at the creation of the CIA’s drone program—and who cheered the lethal authorities the spy agency was handed after the September 11 attacks—had become deeply ambivalent. Ross Newland still praises a weapon that allows the United States to wage war without carpet-bombing enemy territories or indiscriminately lobbing artillery shells into remote villages in Pakistan, but he thinks that the CIA should have given up Predators and Reapers years ago. The allure of killing people by remote control, he said, is like “catnip,” and drones have made the CIA the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be the spy agency’s job to nurture relationships for the purpose of gathering intelligence. The Predator, Newland said, “ends up hurting the CIA.
This just is not an intelligence mission
.”

Richard Blee played an even more critical role at the dawn of the drone age. As head of the CIA’s Alec Station, the unit inside the Counterterrorist Center with the specific mission of finding Osama bin Laden, Blee was among a small group of counterterrorism zealots who chafed at the restrictions placed on the spy agency in the years before the September 11 attacks. Together with his boss, J. Cofer Black, Blee pushed for the CIA to be given lethal authority to kill bin Laden and his minions. During the summer of 2001, he stood in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, watching as missiles fired from a Predator destroyed a mockup of bin Laden’s Tarnak Farms training camp. Weeks later he watched in agony as thousands died on September 11, wondering whether he and his colleagues could have pushed harder to prevent the attacks. On his desk, he still keeps a piece of rubble from the destroyed replica of Tarnak Farms.

He has left the CIA, and in the years since his retirement he has been burdened by doubts about the wisdom of the CIA’s targeted-killing mission. As the bar for carrying out lethal action lowered, and the agency was given permission to launch missiles in Pakistan when American spies weren’t even certain whom they were killing—so-called signature strikes—he grew dismayed. What had originally been conceived as a device the United States might use selectively was being abused, Blee thought.

“In the early days, for our consciences we wanted to know who we were killing before anyone pulled the trigger,” Blee said. “Now, we’re lighting these people up all over the place.”

The pistons of the killing machine, he said, operate entirely without friction. “Every drone strike is an execution,” Blee said. “And if we are going to hand down death sentences, there ought to be some public accountability and some public discussion about the whole thing.”

He paused. “And it should be a debate that Americans can understand.”

—

ABOUT AN HOUR OUTSIDE
of Las Vegas, after the stucco houses of the city’s suburbs have disappeared and the landscape has turned into low creosote shrubs and spiky Joshua trees, the highway swings to the west and descends into a valley. A cluster of low, beige buildings appears in the distance, and above them a small plane resembling an insect flies slow, lazy circles in the sky. It rises over a cluster of hills to the right of the highway, turns to the left, and touches down on a runway carved out of the desert sand.

The town of Indian Springs, Nevada, elevation 3,123 feet, can be seen in a three-minute drive. It is mostly a collection of RV parks and mobile homes, served by two gas stations, a motel, and Auntie Moe’s Trading Post. A billboard above the post office advertises the nearest chain amenities:
DENNY’S, SUBWAY, MOTEL 6 — 1 HOUR AHEAD
. The small casino where Curt Hawes and his team had a celebratory breakfast in February 2001, after making history by firing the first missile from a Predator, still sits at the edge of town. But like the rest of Indian Springs, it’s mostly empty; thanks to a new bypass road,
it is no longer a stop for tourists
on their way to Death Valley from Las Vegas.

The lonely town has reaped none of the benefits of the robust growth taking place just across the highway, behind miles of fencing and guard posts, where armed soldiers deny entry to the curious. It was in the middle of the last decade that Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field was renamed Creech Air Force Base, and the ramshackle, windswept base where the early Predator test pilots tinkered with a new way of war began its transformation into ground zero for American killing operations overseas. Sitting on twenty-three hundred acres of desert, Creech is now so busy that the Air Force is hoping to expand the base by buying land from local businesses, a move that could render Indian Springs even more of a ghost town.

Both the Pentagon and CIA fly drone missions out of Creech, and military personnel and civilian contractors involved in the drone program still commute to the base from the Las Vegas suburbs, pulling shifts in long, sand-colored trailers lined up into neat rows. Sometimes they fly training missions at Creech, navigating the Predators and Reapers near the base, honing their deadly skills by tracking civilian cars and trucks driving along lonely roads. But mostly the pilots are fighting a war thousands of miles away—in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, and across the great desert expanse of North Africa. In the weeks after the September 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Libya, the skies above Benghazi filled with the buzzing sound of American drones, sent there to track down the perpetrators of the attack.

At the edge of the Nevada base, washed-out red cement barriers carry a proud message:

CREECH AFB: HOME OF THE HUNTERS

EPILOGUE:
A SPY IN LEISURE WORLD

“This is where the business is going.”

—Dewey Clarridge

D
ewey Clarridge fell down. A year after the Pentagon shuttered his private spying operation, Clarridge stumbled in his house near San Diego and broke several bones. The accident put him in the hospital, where he was more ornery than usual, and forced him to relocate to the East Coast to be closer to his family. The seventy-nine-year-old former CIA officer—the founder of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, one of the principal public villains of the Iran–Contra scandal, and the man who once bragged about coming up with the idea of mining the harbors of Nicaragua while he was drinking gin—moved to Leisure World.

He rented an apartment in one of the high-rise towers that dominates Leisure World’s leafy campus, twenty-five miles from Washington, D.C., a retirement village trying to reel in baby boomers by marketing itself as “The Destination for the Ageless Generation.” A Yankee Republican born during the Depression, Clarridge was hardly a boomer and generally detested much of what the generation had come to represent.

I drove out to meet him in June 2012, unsure of what kind of a reception I would get. I had written a good deal about Clarridge, and much of it I knew he didn’t like. But he greeted me warmly when I pulled up to the Italian restaurant on the retirement village’s property, where Clarridge appeared to be the only customer and had taken a table to enjoy the late afternoon sun. He looked like any other retiree. He was dressed in a salmon-colored shirt, unbuttoned at the top to allow the gold chain around his neck to peek out. He wore sneakers and white socks and somehow was tanner than he had been when living in San Diego. He told me he had adjusted to his new surroundings but complained that his cats were less than pleased. “Everyone here has dogs. Those little dogs.”

It was a bit ironic that Clarridge was now living just miles from the CIA, an agency he viewed largely with scorn, but he didn’t seem to miss California or lament his move back to the East Coast.

“This is where the business is going,” he said.

By “the business” he meant the private intelligence business. And he was right. The drive out of Washington to the exurban retirement village cut through the gleaming glass towers and sprawling office parks of Northern Virginia that, over the past decade, had sprouted almost from nothing. America’s defense and intelligence industries, once spread throughout the country in places like Southern California and the Midwest, had gradually consolidated and relocated to the Washington area. The companies chose to move closer to what they called “the customer”: the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence services. Government contractors large and small now form a ring around the capital like an army laying siege to a medieval town.

The private military and intelligence business was booming. By 2012, the global battlefield had stretched America’s secret army beyond its capacities. The CIA and other intelligence services had outsourced some of their most essential missions to private contractors, who were being hired for espionage missions and to carry out intelligence analysis. They were hired to support CIA drone operations: from sitting in ground-control stations in Nevada to loading missiles and bombs onto the drones at classified bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel for the CIA and now partner in a prestigious Washington law firm, represents some of the companies that have won black contracts for doing military or intelligence work. It is stunning, Smith told me, how much the American government has outsourced the basic functions of spycraft to private contractors (many of the companies led by former CIA officers and special-operations troops), who promise they can do a better job than federal employees. Erik Prince sold off Blackwater and moved to the United Arab Emirates, but other companies took its place, companies that do a far better job staying out of the headlines than Blackwater did. As the American way of war has moved away from clashes between tank columns, outside the declared war zones and into the shadows, a cottage industry has materialized to become an indispensable part of a new military-intelligence complex.

Smith sometimes bristles at the relentlessly negative portrayal of private contractors, but he also sees the potential for trouble if the needs of the mission conflict with a company’s profit imperative. “There’s an inevitable tension as to where the contractor’s loyalties lie,” he said. “Do they lie with the flag? Or do they lie with the bottom line?”

By the middle of 2012, Michele Ballarin was still trying hard to win another long-term government contract for her work in Africa, and she saw opportunity in the chaos that was spreading across the northern part of the continent. After radical Islamists took over a vast stretch of desert in northern Mali, and after it became clear that Washington once again was struggling to get intelligence about a country it had long ignored, Ballarin told me she was making contacts with Tuareg rebels in the eastern part of Mali and was hatching a plan to drive Islamists out of the country. She didn’t elaborate.

Her planning wasn’t limited to Africa. Ballarin was looking for investors for a new project to build a fleet of seaplanes modeled after the original Grumman G-21 Goose, planes that she thought the American military could use to land troops in remote locations that didn’t have working airstrips. She was even scouting business opportunities in Cuba that might make her rich once Fidel Castro finally died and Communism in Cuba came to an end.

That summer day in 2012, it seemed very unlikely that Dewey Clarridge would ever again dip his cup into the stream of government money going to intelligence contractors. His operation with Michael Furlong had concluded ignominiously, and Furlong had quietly been forced into retirement. Clarridge was still angry about how the episode ended. As he saw it, it was yet another example of bureaucrats in Washington protecting their turf at the expense of soldiers in the field, who desperately needed the intelligence he could provide, if only to avoid relying on the CIA. But he said he was determined to stay in the game. He told me he still kept his network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of whom could be maintained on a shoestring budget. If Washington was too foolish to make use of his people, he said, maybe another friendly government might be more enlightened.