The Way of the Knife (47 page)

“the nation has relied on mercenaries”:
Author interview with two former senior CIA officials.

“paying for all sorts of intelligence activities”:
Ciralsky.

lobbying their former agencies:
Author interview with two former CIA officials.

“Deniability is built in”:
Enrique Prado e-mail, dated October 2007, released during investigation by Senate Armed Services Committee.

the CIA had first proposed:
Ciralsky.

“We were building”:
Ibid.

vacuumed out of the shredder:
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.,
Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved Lives
(New York: Threshold Editions, 2012): 194.

the CIA trying to cover its back:
Details about the exchange between Hadley and Goss come from two former CIA officials and one White House official during the Bush administration.

criminally liable for participating:
Three CIA officers who attended the meeting with Andrew Card described the scene in the conference room.

reaching nearly $8 billion in 2007:
Dana Priest and Ann Scott Tyson, “Bin Laden Trail ‘Stone Cold,’”
The Washington Post
(September 10, 2006). See also, Wayne Downing, “Special Operations Forces Assessment,” (Memorandum for Secretary of Defense, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff, November 9, 2005).

“Neither was easy to understand”:
Stanley A. McChrystal, “It Takes a Network,”
Foreign Policy
(March/April 2011).

extracted from thumb drives:
Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “‘Top Secret America’: A Look at the Military’s Joint Special Operations Command,”
The Washington Post
(September 2, 2011).

sustained operations:
Downing.

“The future fight,” it read:
Ibid.

risky spying missions inside Iran:
Author interview with two former senior Pentagon officials and a retired CIA officer.

who was in charge of each front:
Details about CIA and Pentagon negotiations come from two former CIA officers and Robert Andrews interviewed by author.

missed Patek but killed several others:
Information about the missile strike in the Philippines comes from four current and former CIA officers.

give away the precise coordinates:
Author interview with senior military officer who participated in the surveillance missions.

officials took only hours:
Information about the Damadola operation in 2006 comes from two former CIA officers.

CHAPTER 8: A WAR BY PROXY

payment for their services:
Author interview with CIA, State Department, and congressional officials. See also, Mark Mazzetti, “Efforts by CIA Fail in Somalia, Officials Charge,”
The New York Times
(June 8, 2006).

“cultivating supporters”:
Director of National Intelligence, “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” (declassified key judgments of the National Intelligence Estimate, April 2006).

“People made relationships”:
Robert Worth, “Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?”
The New York Times
(July 6, 2010).

al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula:
The Interpol notice is cited in Bill Roggio, “Al Qaeda Jailbreak in Yemen,”
Long War Journal
(February 8, 2006).

punishments like stoning adulterers:
David H. Shinn, “Al Qaeda in East Africa and the Horn,”
The Journal of Conflict Studies
27, no. 1 (2007).

a weak and corrupt organization:
Bronwyn Bruton, “Somalia: A New Approach,”
Council on Foreign Relations
, Council Special Report no. 52 (March 2010): 7.

reopen some of its previously shuttered stations:
Author interview with three former senior CIA officials.

found themselves being extorted:
Clint Watts, Jacob Shapiro, and Vahid Brown, “Al-Qa’ida’s (Mis)Adventures in the Horn of Africa,” Harmony Project Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, July 2, 2007, 19–21.

the CIA was running guns:
Author interview with State Department and congressional officials described Nairobi cables.

“positive U.S. steps”:
Cables from the American embassy in Tanzania to State Department, “CT in Horn of Africa: Results and Recommendations from May 23–24 RSI,” July 3, 2006.

amassed a small fortune:
“Miscellaneous Monongalia County, West Virginia Obituaries: Edward Robert Golden,” Genealogybuff.com
.
Also, Edgar Simpson, “Candidates Promise to Liven Last Days Before Election,”
The Charleston Gazette
(October 26, 1986).

cutting up a piece of cardboard:
United Press International, “Braille Playboy Criticized,” September 27, 1986. Also, “Debate with Stand-In Short in Fayetteville,”
The Charleston Gazette
(August 19, 1986).

“It symbolizes a gentler way”:
Ellen Gamerman, “To know if you’re anybody, check the list: In Washington, the snobby old Green Book is relished as a throwback to less-tacky times,”
The Baltimore Sun
(October 22, 1997).

the transformation of Michele into Amira began:
Author interview with Michele Ballarin.

“He has appointed his chief”:
The e-mails were first reported by Patrick Smith in the September 8, 2006, issue of respected newsletter
Africa Confidential.
More e-mail excerpts were included in a September 10, 2006, story in
The Observer
of the United Kingdom.

the French debacle in Indochina in 1954:
Ibid.

A better bet, he said, was the Pentagon:
Ibid.

free to spend the day at the beach:
Author interview with Bronwyn Bruton.

it would try to ensure:
Details of Abizaid’s visit to Addis Ababa comes from an American official stationed at the embassy at the time.

ten thousand people displaced by the floods:
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “OCHA Situation Report No. 1: Dire Dawa Floods – Ethiopia occurred on August 06, 2006,” August 7, 2006.

senior ICU operatives:
Details about the clandestine shipments into Dire Dawa come from two former military officials involved in the operation. The same officials described the makeup of Task Force 88.

a small fishing village:
Michael R. Gordon and Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Used Base in Ethiopia to Hunt Al Qaeda,”
The New York Times
(February 23, 2007).

kill his father:
Human Rights Watch, “So Much to Fear: War Crimes and the Devastation of Somalia,” December 8, 2008. See also Bronwyn Bruton, “Somalia: A New Approach,” 9.

CHAPTER 9: THE BASE

“The ideal person”:
Information in this chapter about Art Keller’s experiences in North and South Waziristan come from author interviews with Keller.

“Eighteen months later”:
Author interview with Arthur Keller.

he held a grenade up:
Amir Latif, “Pakistan’s Most Wanted,”
Islam Online
(January 29, 2008).

the wrong photograph:
Lisa Myers, “U.S. Posts Wrong Photo of ‘al-Qaida Operative,’”
MSNBC
(January 26, 2006).

the uncomfortable position:
Conflicts were also erupting between CIA officers in Afghanistan and those in Pakistan, battles that reflected the animosities between the two countries on both sides of a porous border. For much of 2005, the station chief in Kabul, Greg, had been writing reports about spasms of violence in Afghanistan and blaming Pakistan’s inability to control the militants crossing into Afghanistan from the tribal areas. CIA officers in Kabul were also receiving alarming reports about Pakistan’s complicity in the attacks from Amrullah Saleh, the director of Afghanistan’s spy service, a former fighter with the Northern Alliance who despised Pakistan and its historical ties to the Taliban. Greg had a particularly close relationship with President Hamid Karzai, and Karzai believed he even owed Greg his life. In 2001, when Greg was part of a Special Forces team inserted into Afghanistan at the beginning of the American invasion, he saved Karzai from being blown up by a Taliban bomb. The CIA station chief in Islamabad, Sean, thought the tight relationship between Greg and Karzai had warped CIA analysis in Afghanistan, and accused Greg of “going native” by accepting conspiracy theories spun by Afghan intelligence about Pakistan’s meddling in Afghanistan. Sean also believed that secret missions into Pakistan’s tribal areas by both JSOC and a CIA-trained Afghan militias, which the agency had named Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, were an unnecessary risk and threatened to get the CIA kicked out of Pakistan. The tribalism got so bad that Porter Goss intervened, calling both Sean and Greg to a meeting at the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar in July as a way to get the two men in the same room and dampen tensions between the dueling CIA outposts.

had converted to Islam:
Greg Miller, “At CIA, a Convert to Islam Leads the Terrorist Hunt,”
The Washington Post
(March 24, 2012).

nineteen thousand of them children:
Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, “EERI Special Earthquake Report,” February 2006.

“angels of mercy”:
Trip report by Joint Chiefs chairman General Peter Pace, March 30, 2006.

“We actually began to develop”:
Author interview with Michael Hayden.

an uneventful arrest:
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.,
Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives
(New York: Threshold Editions, 2012): 8.

a mission bedeviled:
Hayden’s description of hunting the courier network as a “bank shot” is in Peter L. Bergen,
Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden—from 9/11 to Abbottabad
(New York: Crown, 2012): 104.

information that the CIA:
Bergen, 100.