The Way of the Knife
The Penguin Press
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © Mark Mazzetti, 2013
ISBN 978-1-101-61794-6
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Photograph credits appear here.
FOR LINDSAY AND MAX
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
PROLOGUE: THE WAR BEYOND
1: PERMISSION TO KILL
2: A MARRIAGE AMONG SPIES
3: CLOAK-AND-DAGGER MEN
4: RUMSFELD’S SPIES
5: THE ANGRY BIRD
6: A TRUE PASHTUN
7: CONVERGENCE
8: A WAR BY PROXY
9: THE BASE
10: GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS
11: THE OLD MAN’S RETURN
12: THE SCALPEL’S EDGE
13: THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA
14: THE UNRAVELING
15: THE DOCTOR AND THE SHEIKH
16: FIRE FROM THE SKY
EPILOGUE: A SPY IN LEISURE WORLD
PHOTOGRAPHS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON SOURCES
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PHOTO CREDITS
INDEX
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (CIA)
Charles Allen, Assistant Director, Collection, 1998–2005
J. Cofer Black, Director, Counterterrorist Center (CTC), 1999–2002
Dennis Blair, Associate Director, Military Support, 1995–1996; Director of National Intelligence, 2009–2010
Richard Blee, Chief, Alec Station (bin Laden Unit of Counterterrorist Center), 1999–2001
William Casey, Director, 1981–1987
Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, operations officer and founder of the Counterterrorist Center
Raymond Davis, CIA contractor, arrested in Pakistan in 2011
Porter Goss, Director, 2004–2006
Robert Grenier, Chief of Station, Islamabad, 1999–2002; Director, Counterterrorism Center, 2004–2006*
Michael Hayden, Director, 2006–2009
Stephen Kappes, Deputy Director, 2006–2010
Art Keller, operations officer in Pakistan, 2006
Mike, Director, Counterterrorism Center, 2006–
Ross Newland, operations officer in Latin America and Eastern Europe; later, top official at CIA headquarters
Leon Panetta, Director, 2009–2011
James Pavitt, Deputy Director, Operations, 1999–2004
David Petraeus, Director, 2011–2012; Commander, United States Central Command, 2008–2010
Enrique Prado, operations officer working the Counterterrorist Center and later a Blackwater employee
Jose Rodriguez, Director, Counterterrorist Center, 2002–2004; Deputy Director, Operations, 2004–2007
George Tenet, Director, 1997–2004
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
Robert Andrews, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, 2001–2002
Stephen Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, 2003–2007
Michael Furlong, Defense Department official involved in information operations who eventually oversaw private spying operation
Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense, 2006–2011
General Stanley McChrystal, Commander, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 2003–2008
Admiral William McRaven, Commander, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 2008–2011
Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2007–2011
Thomas O’Connell, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, 2003–2006
Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense, 2011–2013
Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 2001–2006
THE WHITE HOUSE
John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, 2009–2013
Richard Clarke, Counterterrorism Coordinator, 1998–2001
PAKISTAN
Shakil Afridi, Pakistani physician hired to spy for the CIA
Lt. General Mahmud Ahmed, Director-General, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 1999–2001
Lt. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, Pakistani military commander responsible for operations in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)
Raymond Davis, CIA contractor arrested in Lahore in 2011
Lt. General Ehsan ul Haq, Director-General, Inter-Services Intelligence, 2001–2004
Jalaluddin Haqqani, leader of criminal network based in Pakistani tribal areas who has carried out attacks against American troops in Afghanistan
General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Director-General, Inter-Services Intelligence, 2004–2007; Chief of Army Staff, 2007–
Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani Taliban leader after the death of Nek Muhammad Wazir
Brigadier-General Asad Munir, ISI station chief in Peshawar, 2001–2003
Cameron Munter, United States Ambassador in Islamabad, 2010–2012
Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Director-General, Inter-Services Intelligence, 2008–2012
Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, head of Lashkar-e-Taiba (“Army of the Pure”)
Nek Muhammad Wazir, Pakistani Taliban leader in tribal areas
YEMEN
Ibrahim al-Asiri, master bomb maker for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, son of Anwar al-Awlaki
Anwar al-Awlaki, radical preacher and member of AQAP who was an American citizen
Ali Abdullah Saleh, President, 1990–2012
SOMALIA
Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, early leader of al Shabaab
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, leader of Islamic Courts Union
Michele “Amira” Ballarin, American businesswoman and government contractor
Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, Kenyan member of al Qaeda’s East Africa cell killed in 2009
Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT), collection of CIA-funded Somali warlords
Al Shabaab (“The Youth”), armed wing of Islamic Courts Union
PROLOGUE: THE WAR BEYOND
“Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness. The scalphunters were the exception to his own rule. They weren’t gradual and they weren’t gentle either. . . .”
—John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Escorted by Pakistani policemen, the burly American spy was brought into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi, and English, the investigator tried to decipher the facts of the case.
“America, you from America?”
“Yes.”
“You’re from America and you belong to the American embassy?”
“Yes,” the anxious American voice boomed above the chatter. “My passport—at the site I showed the police officer . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”
On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered fla
nnel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges from a lanyard around his neck. It was one of the few things he had managed to hold on to after the chaotic scene at the traffic circle.
“This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent badge proving his employment in the American consulate in Lahore.
A telephone rang, and one of the officers in the crowded room dispatched with the call quickly. “We arrested an embassy man. I will call you back.” The interrogation resumed.
“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?”
“Yes.”
“As a . . . ?”
“I, I just work as a consultant there.”
“Consultant?” The man behind the desk was skeptical. He paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?”
“Raymond Davis,” the officer responded.
“Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”
“Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked.
“Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.
Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”
Behind the chair where Davis had taken a seat, another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update.
“Is he understanding everything? And he just killed two men?”
Raymond Allen Davis—a former high school football and wrestling star from western Virginia, a retired Army Green Beret and onetime private soldier for Blackwater USA, and now a clandestine CIA operative in Pakistan—had hours earlier been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs, and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan.
But by 2011, the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn, and factions that once had little contact with each other had cemented new alliances to survive the CIA’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India had begun aligning themselves closer to al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was the very reason why Raymond Davis and a CIA team had set up operations from a safe house in the city.
But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who had approached his car with guns drawn, while riding a black motorcycle, at a traffic circle congested with cars, bicycles, and rickshaws. Davis had taken his semiautomatic Glock pistol and blown a handful of bullets through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men in the stomach, arm, and elsewhere on his body. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his Honda and shot several rounds into his back.
He radioed the American consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the car struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then left with Davis still standing in the middle of the road. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was scattered at the scene, including a black mask, approximately one hundred bullets, and a piece of cloth with an American flag. The cell phone inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously.
Within days of the debacle at the traffic circle, the CIA director would lie to Pakistan’s spymaster during a phone call and private meeting, denying that Davis worked for the CIA. President Barack Obama was vague during a press conference about Davis’s role in the country, calling for the release of “our diplomat in Pakistan.” The CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who had arrived in the country just days before the shootings, fought openly with the American ambassador there, insisting that the United States give no ground, and cut no deals, to secure Davis’s release. The game in Pakistan had changed, he said, and the time of friendly relations between the CIA and Pakistan’s spy service had passed.
From now on, things would be handled according to Moscow Rules—the unwritten, unforgiving ways of spycraft practiced between enemies during the Cold War.
In an instant, the bloody affair seemed to confirm all the conspiracies ginned up inside crowded bazaars and corridors of power in Pakistan: that the United States had sent a vast secret army to Pakistan, men who sowed chaos and violence as part of a covert American war in the country. The wife of one of Davis’s victims, convinced that her husband’s killer would never be brought to justice, swallowed a lethal amount of rat poison.
But the Davis affair also told a bigger story. The former Green Beret hired by the CIA for a manhunt in Pakistan was the face of an American spy agency that has been transformed after a decade of conflicts far from declared war zones. No longer a traditional espionage service devoted to stealing the secrets of foreign governments, the Central Intelligence Agency has become a killing machine, an organization consumed with man hunting.
And just as the CIA has come to take on tasks traditionally associated with the military, with spies turned into soldiers, so has the opposite occurred. The American military has been dispersed into the dark spaces of American foreign policy, with commando teams running spying missions that Washington would never have dreamed of approving in the years before 9/11. Prior to the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon did very little human spying, and the CIA was not officially permitted to kill. In the years since, each has done a great deal of both, and a military-intelligence complex has emerged to carry out the new American way of war.
The historical contours of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are by now well known. But for more than a decade a separate and parallel war has been waged, a dark reflection of the “big wars” that America began after the September 11 attacks. In a shadow war waged across the globe, America has pursued its enemies using killer robots and special-operations troops. It has paid privateers to set up clandestine spying networks and relied on mercurial dictators, unreliable foreign intelligence services, and ragtag proxy armies. In places where the United States couldn’t send ground troops, fringe characters materialized to play outsize roles, including a chain-smoking Pentagon official who teamed up with a CIA figure from the Iran–Contra scandal to run an off-the-books spying operation in Pakistan, and an heiress from the horse country of Virginia, who became obsessed with Somalia and convinced the Pentagon to hire her to hunt al Qaeda operatives there.
The war has stretched across multiple continents, from the mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Yemen and North Africa, from the simmering clan wars of Somalia to the dense jungles of the Philippines. The foundations of the secret war were laid by a conservative Republican president and embraced by a liberal Democratic one who became enamored of what he had inherited. President Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars that topple governments and require years of American occupation. In the words of John Brennan, one of President Obama’s closest advisers whom Obama eventually tapped to run the CIA, instead of the “hammer” America now relies on the “scalpel.”
The analogy suggests that this new kind of war is without costs or blunders—a surgery without complications. This isn’t the case. The way of the knife has created enemies just as it has obliterated them. It has fomented resentment among former allies and at times contributed to instability even as it has attempted to bring order to chaos. It has short-circuited the normal mechanisms for how the United States as a nation goes to war, and turned the American president into the final arbiter of whether specific people in far-off lands live or die. This way of war has had many successes, including the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden and his most trusted followers. But it has also lowered the bar for waging war, and it is now easier for the United States to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth than at any other time in its history. Wha
t follows is a story about an experiment that has lasted more than a decade, and what has emerged from the laboratory.
—
SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE SAW a glimpse of the future just weeks after the September 11 attacks. The head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, Dearlove came to the United States with other top British intelligence officials to show solidarity with the United Kingdom’s closest ally. Dearlove arrived at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to deliver the message personally that British spies were opening up their books, giving the CIA rare access to all the MI6 files on members of al Qaeda.
The British had tutored the Americans in the dark arts during World War II but had long approached the spy game differently. In 1943, one member of Winston Churchill’s Special Operations Executive complained that the “American temperament demands quick and spectacular results, while the British policy is generally speaking long-term and plodding.” He pointed out the dangers of the strategy carried out by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, which relied on blowing up weapons depots, cutting telephone lines, and land-mining enemy supply lines. The Americans had more money than brains, he warned, and the OSS’s “hankering after playing cowboys and red Indians” could only lead to trouble for the alliance.