The Way of the Knife Read online

  Funding for the program had been channeled through the Air Force’s “Big Safari” office, a classified division based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, in charge of developing secret intelligence programs for the military. Big Safari’s mandate was to cut through Pentagon bureaucracy to get certain weapons from the drawing board to the field more quickly than usual, which sometimes meant that they went into combat before they were entirely ready. Such was the case in 2000 with the early model Predators, aircraft with a haphazard control panel that some pilots likened to the scattered features of a Mr. Potato Head doll. Just one of the significant design flaws was that the button that killed the engine on the drone was only a quarter inch from the button that launched the Hellfire missile—creating the possibility for human error with deadly consequences.

  The bigger problem, however, was that nobody was quite sure what launching the missile might do to the drone itself. Would the force of the missile rupture the airframe or rip the Predator’s wings in midflight? In January 2001, a test was conducted in the high desert of China Lake, California, to find out. Three days after President Bush was sworn into office, Air Force engineers chained a Predator to a concrete pad on top of a small mountain and fired a Hellfire missile from the drone. The missile hit a target tank in its path, and the Predator was undamaged. Live flight tests could proceed.

  Hours before dawn on February 16, 2001, Curt Hawes left the command post in the abandoned church at Indian Springs and drove twenty miles into the desert. He had gone over the preflight checklist in his mind the night before, sitting in his bedroom in Las Vegas. His eyes closed, he practiced the moves his hands would make as he controlled the Predator joystick and fired a missile.

  Maybe for the first time in the history of American flight, the drama surrounding a landmark test had nothing to do with concerns about whether the pilot would survive. Curt Hawes didn’t wake up on the morning of February 16 as Chuck Yeager had before he squeezed into the cockpit of the Bell X-1, hoping he wouldn’t be the latest test pilot to die trying to break the sound barrier. Hawes faced no risk whatsoever, which is exactly why it was a watershed moment: The United States was developing a new weapon for war that required no one actually going to war.

  The test was planned for early morning, when the desert winds would be calmest. Shortly after sunrise, Hawes took control of the Predator from the team that had launched the drone off the runway at Indian Springs. He slowly made it descend to two thousand feet, the highest altitude from which a Hellfire missile had ever been fired. He lined up the shot with the help of a laser beam pointed at a target tank in the desert, the laser directed by an Army contractor on the ground. Pressing the button, he launched the Hellfire missile.

  What Hawes remembers was the silence. He was a pilot, but he was miles away from his plane. He couldn’t hear the sound of the Hellfire’s rocket engine firing or feel the plane buffet when he launched the missile. His video screen flickered from the missile’s heat trail, and he watched the missile propel toward the target tank for a direct hit.

  The engineers had decided not to use a live warhead for the test, so there was no explosion. The dummy missile struck the tank’s turret six inches to the right of dead center, denting the armor and spinning the turret thirty degrees. The test was declared an unqualified success. By 7 A.M., it was done, and the Predator team met at the little casino adjacent to the Indian Springs base for a celebratory breakfast.

  Air Force leaders were giddy, and by the second test, five days later, they had arranged for a group of generals to gather at the Pentagon to watch the Hellfire shot through a video feed sent from Nevada. This time, Curt Hawes flew the Predator using a satellite, creating a two-second lag between his joystick movements and the actual movements of the plane. This made the Predator more difficult to control, but once again the Hellfire scored a direct hit. This time, the missile carried a live warhead, and when it found its target a small ball of fire rose into the morning sky.

  The age of armed, remote-controlled conflict had begun with little fanfare. The Air Force issued a short press release, which led to a small story in a local Las Vegas newspaper. A congressman from Nevada called to congratulate the Predator team, but the engineers and pilots were disappointed when a CNN crew that was rumored to be coming to film the test didn’t show up. CIA officials had been trying to keep the entire operation a secret and were angry that the Air Force even put out a press release. CNN was never allowed on base.

  Curt Hawes didn’t know any of these details. All he heard was that “other parties” had intervened to keep his work a secret.

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  BUT THOSE “OTHER PARTIES” couldn’t decide what to do with the armed drone. Even after the successful missile tests, the CIA remained divided at the top about whether to send armed Predators to Afghanistan to hunt for Osama bin Laden. Pavitt, head of the CIA’s clandestine service, was a one-man Greek chorus arguing forcefully against the CIA running the Predator program. He wanted to spend his black budget on hiring more case officers, not buying drones. He would repeatedly ask a question during meetings that now seems quaint after the billions of dollars that have poured into counterterrorism programs since the September 11 attacks: Was the $2 million for each Predator going to come out of the CIA or the Pentagon budget?

  But he also voiced a much deeper concern, one shared by other members of Tenet’s staff. What exactly were the repercussions of the CIA getting back into assassinations? “You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority,” said John McLaughlin, then the CIA’s deputy director. “When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,’ I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’” he said. “It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently.”

  Moreover, the United States was scolding other countries for the exact same thing it was debating whether to undertake. When Israel’s government was killing off Hamas leaders in 2000 and 2001 during the second Palestinian intifada, American ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk said that “the United States is very clearly on the record as being against targeted assassinations. . . . They are extrajudicial killings and we do not support that.”

  George Tenet was ambivalent and repeatedly said he thought it should be the military, not the CIA, that pulled the trigger on a weapon of war. During one discussion about whether a CIA officer should be allowed to authorize Predator strikes, both Charles Allen and Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, the agency’s third-ranking official, volunteered to pull the trigger themselves. This infuriated Tenet. He later told the 9/11 Commission he scolded Allen and Krongard, telling them they had no authority to fire a Hellfire missile, and neither did he.

  Sitting near Tenet’s side during all the debates about the Predator, Lt. General John Campbell was a bit like an anthropologist watching the fighting rituals of a strange species. He had spent his career in the Air Force and had moved to Langley the previous summer to take over as the agency’s director of military support. Campbell believed strongly that the CIA should embrace the Predator, but now, when he thinks back to the internal fights over armed drones in the summer of 2001, he understands that the agency was wrestling with the most basic questions about what it wanted to be.

  “In the military culture, if you’re following a legal order—and as an officer you’re expected to follow a legal order—then you’re pretty much protected in the long term for any personal liability for the things you do,” he said. “The CIA is different. They have much less protection. They can be operating under the provisions of a presidential finding where you get a piece of paper with the president’s signature that says, ‘I authorize you to do these things.’ Then, the next administration can come in and Justice decides that the finding was questionable and maybe even illegal—and guess what?—those guys are personally liable for the things they did.

  “Something like the Predator, where you’re specifically targeting individuals, dredges up a whole list of concerns about the fut
ure ramifications,” said Campbell.

  Campbell’s deputy at the time was Ross Newland, who had a front-row seat for the Predator fights. As he sat in the meetings, Newland knew he was watching another turn of the familiar cycle: A “risk-averse” CIA was once again about to wade back into secret war. He supported the Predator program and thought that the Bush administration should use it to kill bin Laden as soon as possible, but he also couldn’t help but think back to his days as a counternarcotics officer in Bolivia. An unprepared CIA had been assigned the mission of chasing drug-runners because nobody else wanted to do it. Two decades later, Newland could see the same thing happening with terrorism.

  Weeks later, when the September 11 attacks killed nearly three thousand Americans, thorny questions about assassination, covert action, and the proper use of the CIA in hunting America’s enemies were quickly swept aside. Within weeks, the CIA began conducting dozens of drone strikes in Afghanistan.

  America had found, in the armed Predator, the ultimate weapon for a secret war. It was a tool that killed quietly, a weapon unbound by the normal rules of accountability in combat. Armed drones would allow American presidents to order strikes on remote villages and desert camps where journalists and independent monitoring groups could not go. The strikes were rarely discussed publicly by a spokesman standing at a podium, but they were cheered in private by politicians from both parties hoping to flex American muscle without putting American lives at risk.

  Rare is the technology that can change the face of warfare. In the first half of the past century, tanks and planes transformed how the world fought its battles. The fifty years that followed were dominated by nuclear warheads and ICBMs, weapons of such horrible power that they gave birth to new doctrines to keep countries from ever using them. The advent of the armed drone upended this calculus: War was possible exactly because it seemed so free of risk. The bar for war had been lowered, the remote-controlled age had begun, and the killer drones became an object of fascination inside the CIA.

  During the summer of 2002, Ross Newland visited the small gift shop at the CIA’s headquarters. Looking to buy some presents for friends, he walked amid the rows of shelves filled with mugs, fleece jackets, and T-shirts emblazoned with the CIA logo. Then he made an unexpected find: a golf shirt with a small drone embroidered on the left side. The Predator still was one of the CIA’s most classified programs, but the spy agency was now hawking images of the drones on souvenirs.

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  THE KILLING OF AL-HARETHI in Yemen later that year showed that the CIA, with a pliable foreign ally, could wage war far beyond war zones. Bush officials were so pleased about the strike in Yemen that news of the attack quickly leaked out, puncturing the thin cover story put out by Yemeni officials about the exploding gas can. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, even praised the strike on CNN.

  President Saleh was furious when he heard about Wolfowitz’s comments. His government had been made to look like fools and liars, and he demanded that American spies and diplomats in Yemen appear in his office immediately. Since Washington couldn’t keep a secret, he told them, America’s hidden war in Yemen would be scaled back. He ordered the Predator flights to stop immediately.

  And they did, for nearly eight years. It wouldn’t be until 2010, with Yemen in turmoil and Saleh losing his grip on power one finger at a time, that another American president would order drones back over the skies of Yemen. By then, Saleh was hardly in any position to object.

  6: A TRUE PASHTUN

  “Things fall out of the sky all the time.”

  —Pervez Musharraf

  Why is this bird following me?”

  Nek Muhammad Wazir sat inside a mud building in South Waziristan, surrounded by his followers and talking on his satellite phone to a BBC reporter. Looking out the window, the young commander with long, jet-black hair noticed something hovering above, glinting in the sun. He asked one of his lieutenants about the coruscating metal object in the sky.

  Nek Muhammad had just humbled Pakistani troops, and the CIA was following him. He had emerged as the undisputed rock star of Pakistan’s tribal areas, a brash member of the Wazir tribe who had raised an army to fight government forces in the spring of 2004 and brought Islamabad to the negotiating table. His rise had taken Pakistan’s leaders by surprise, and now they wanted him dead.

  Nek Muhammad, age twenty-nine, was part of a second generation of Pakistani mujahedeen who saw no cause for loyalty to the ISI that had given succor to their fathers during the war against the Soviets. Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed President Musharraf’s alliance with Washington after the September 11 attacks with disdain, and saw the Pakistani military as no different from the Americans—whom they believed had launched a war of aggression in Afghanistan just like the Soviets had years earlier. Nek Muhammad gave Pakistan’s government its first taste of what would be a growing problem in the coming years: a militancy that extended its reach beyond the western mountains and into the settled areas of the country, near Pakistan’s biggest and most important cities. It was militancy that Islamabad eventually would be unable to control.

  Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Nek Muhammad was sent at an early age to one of the religious seminaries that had sprung up in the area during the 1980s to educate the illiterate youth of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He dropped out after five years and spent the early 1990s surviving as a petty car thief and a shopkeeper in the Wana bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, when he was recruited to fight alongside the Afghan Taliban and against Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance in the civil war then raging in Afghanistan.

  He rose quickly through the Taliban’s military hierarchy, winning a reputation for never conceding in battle, even when his commanders ordered him to pull back. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield, with his long, thin face and unkempt beard brushing the top of his collarbones and his black hair flowing from his white turban. He looked less like a typically scruffy tribal militant and more like a Pashtun version of Che Guevara.

  Nek Muhammad seized an opportunity to become a host for the Arab and Chechen al Qaeda fighters who moved into Pakistan to escape the barrage of American bombs in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. Local tribesmen considered it their religious duty to shelter the fighters, but some also saw the potential for profit, charging the foreigners inflated rents to stay in the protected dwellings of Wana and Shakai, a farming region of large shade trees and steep river valleys. For Nek Muhammad, it was partly a get-rich scheme, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani Frontier Corps installations and American firebases across the border in Afghanistan.

  CIA officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesmen to hand over the Arab and Chechen fighters, but Pashtun tribal custom prohibited such treachery. Reluctantly, Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to hunt down the foreigners and deliver rough justice to Nek Muhammad’s men. It wasn’t the military’s first foray into Waziristan, but for Musharraf there was a new urgency: In late 2003, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a fatwa ordering the Pakistani president’s killing for helping the Americans. On two occasions in December 2003, assassins came close to fulfilling the order, and Musharraf thought that a quick, punishing military campaign in the mountains might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil.

  But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery bludgeoned Wana and the surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreigners. One tribesman told a reporter that when Pakistani troops looted his house, they took not only his clothes but his pillow covers and his shoe polish. Lt. General Safdar Hussain, the commander who led the battle, declared the operation an unqualified success. It had destroyed a milita
nt base, he said, and a network of tunnels containing sophisticated communications equipment.

  But for Pakistan’s government, the game hadn’t been worth the candle. Military casualties were higher than anticipated. During one battle, on March 16, when troops laid siege to a fortress belonging to Nek Muhammad and two other senior militants, fifteen Frontier Corps troops and one Pakistani regular-army soldier were killed. Fourteen other soldiers were taken hostage, and dozens of army trucks, artillery pieces, and armored personnel carriers were destroyed. In Islamabad, clerics of the influential mosque Lal Masjid issued a message calling for the people of South Waziristan to resist the army’s offensive and for Pakistani troops to be denied Islamic burials. Obeying the order, some parents refused to accept the bodies of their slain sons. In Waziristan, tribesmen who already opposed the military’s deployment into the mountains were furious about the indiscriminate assault on Wana. Attacks against Frontier Corps posts increased, and Islamabad began looking for a way out.

  On April 24, 2004, Pashtun tribesmen danced in a circle and banged drums as President Musharraf’s military envoys arrived at the madrassa school in Shakai, near Wana, where Nek Muhammad’s men were waiting for them. General Hussain came in person, a sign of just how desperate Musharraf was to sue for peace. Tribesmen presented AK-47s to the military men, a traditional gesture of peace, and General Hussain hugged Nek Muhammad and hung a garland of bright flowers around his neck. The two men sat next to each other and sipped tea as photographers and television cameramen recorded the event.

  When the formalities were finished, the general addressed the hundreds of men sitting cross-legged in the dirt, dressed in flowing shalwar kameez and wearing flat woolen pakul hats. The general told the crowd that the United States had been foolish to make war in Afghanistan. “When America’s World Trade Center was hit by a plane, how many Afghan pilots were involved?” the general asked. “Since there were no Afghan pilots, why is there this situation in Afghanistan?”