The Way of the Knife Page 13

  The room became restless. Prodded by his chief of staff, Patrick Murray, Porter Goss interrupted Card.

  “Can you assure these people that the politicians will not walk away from the people who carried out this program?” Goss asked. Card didn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he tried to crack a joke.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Every morning I knock on the door of the Oval Office, walk in, and say, ‘Pardon me, Mr. President.’ And, of course, the only person the president can’t pardon is himself.”

  Card giggled after he said this, but his joke landed with a thud. The White House chief of staff, when asked whether President Bush would protect CIA officers from legal scrutiny, had suggested that the most they might be able to rely on is a presidential pardon after the indictments and the convictions were handed down.

  At the CIA, pardon jokes don’t go down well.

  —

  SOME OF PRESIDENT BUSH’S AIDES began to see the CIA as a problem. The agency’s director was doing battle with the White House over the detention program, and Vice President Cheney had become convinced that CIA analysts secretly opposed the war in Iraq and were leaking negative assessments about the war to members of Congress and the press. As much as Bush and Cheney had originally tried to resist pressure by the 9/11 Commission to create a director of national intelligence to take control over all sixteen American spy agencies, some at the White House saw an ancillary benefit of the new position: It put the CIA in its place.

  A weakened CIA presented an opportunity for Donald Rumsfeld. The worsening situation in Iraq had dampened some of the triumphalism among Rumsfeld and his staff, but the defense secretary continued with his efforts to wage war far from declared war zones—in countries that historically had been the CIA’s turf. In 2004 Rumsfeld issued a secret directive—known internally at the Pentagon as the “Al Qaeda Network Execute Order”—that expanded the powers of special-operations troops to kill, capture, and spy in more than a dozen countries. The order gave Joint Special Operations Command, the unit based at Fort Bragg that Rumsfeld had come to identify as a new model army for the post–September 11 era, broad authority to launch operations across an arc of territory from North Africa all the way to the Philippines. It allowed them to go into Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan. Under the new authorities, the missions were highly classified, seldom publicly acknowledged, and irregularly briefed to members of Congress.

  Joint Special Operations Command was now one of the brightest stars in the Defense Department firmament, and the budget for special operations more than doubled over six years, reaching nearly $8 billion in 2007. This was still just a sliver of the Pentagon’s budgets for buying ships and jets, but the infusion of money allowed JSOC not only to build more platoons of secret troops but also to spend money on supplies and logistics that would allow Navy SEALs and Delta Force operatives to sustain clandestine operations for days or weeks on end. No longer was JSOC capable merely of twenty-four-hour hostage-rescue missions. It could run wars of its own.

  JSOC was proving as much in Iraq. There, Lt. General Stanley McChrystal’s task force had been handed the mission of attacking the al Qaeda franchise in the country led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Wave upon wave of deadly violence was washing over the country, and al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had claimed responsibility for devastating attacks on American troop convoys and Shi‘ite holy sites. Within months of the beginning of the insurgency, it became clear to commanders on the ground that the war would be sucking American troops into the country for years, and Rumsfeld and his senior intelligence adviser, Stephen Cambone, gave JSOC a long leash to try to neutralize what had become the Iraqi insurgency’s most lethal arm.

  The mantra of the task force, based inside an old Iraqi air-force hangar at Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, was “fight for intelligence.” In the beginning, the white dry-erase boards that McChrystal and his team had set up to diagram the terror group were blank. McChrystal realized that much of the problem came from the poor communication between the various American military commands in Iraq, with few procedures in place to share intelligence with one another. “We began a review of the enemy, and of ourselves,” he would later write. “Neither was easy to understand.” Just how little everyone knew was apparent in 2004, amid reports that Iraqi troops had captured al-Zarqawi near Fallujah. Since nobody knew exactly what the Jordanian terrorist looked like, he was released by accident.

  But a campaign plan eventually developed. Night raids against al-Zarqawi’s network were designed not just to kick down a door and spray gunfire in all directions. McChrystal believed that what was important was not body count but the intelligence that could be gathered through interrogations and computer forensics at the spot of the raid. The intelligence trail could then be followed to the next suspected safe house, where more senior al Qaeda operatives were hiding. Put a needle into one vein, the theory went, and you can learn about the entire system.

  McChrystal tried to ensure that his task force wasn’t crippled by the same rivalries that had hurt special-operations missions in Afghanistan. He courted CIA officers in Iraq and convinced a senior CIA officer to sit beside him each morning for the task force’s daily battlefield update. Thousands of miles away, analysts working in a nondescript government building in Fairfax, Virginia, each day sifted through the intelligence from the previous night’s raids in Iraq that had been extracted from thumb drives, cell phones, and computer hard drives. Over time, the dry-erase boards filled up with the names and aliases of al-Zarqawi’s operatives. The various names were connected by lines drawn with black marker—everyone’s best guess about how an amorphous terror network carried out its business.

  JSOC’s rapid growth was aided by an internal Pentagon study commissioned by Rumsfeld and completed in 2005. The report recommended that the military “must increase capabilities and capacities to conduct sustained operations in multiple, sensitive, non-permissive, and denied areas.” Translated from militaryspeak: Wage simultaneous secret wars in as many places as possible. Written by former JSOC commander General Wayne Downing and Michael G. Vickers—a former CIA clandestine officer who had gained a degree of fame when his role in running guns to Afghanistan during the Soviet war was detailed in the book Charlie Wilson’s War—the report had instant currency with Rumsfeld. Its primary conclusion was that special-operations troops should take a greater role in the Bush administration’s war against al Qaeda and other terror groups. Special-operations troops were well positioned in Iraq and Afghanistan, it concluded, but not the wars of the future. “The future fight,” it read, “will take place in countries with which we are not at war.”

  The Pentagon had even begun carrying out risky spying missions inside Iran. Taking advantage of the commercial traffic crossing Iraq’s eastern border into Iran, special-operations troops were paying agents to cross the border using phony cover stories to collect intelligence about military installations inside western Iran. The foreign agents were both Iranian Muslims and Coptic Christians who could easily get past Iranian border security, telling stories about their plan to buy truckloads full of fruit or other merchandise inside Iran. With such limited cross-border forays, it was difficult for the Pentagon to get truly valuable intelligence from these missions, and the Pentagon wasn’t authorized to conduct any sabotage operations or to kill Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops.

  The real goal, said a senior Pentagon intelligence official during that period, was to build up as much of an intelligence network as possible inside Iran—a network that could be tapped if President Bush or one of his successors decided to invade the country. Like so many other military missions in undeclared war zones, the operations in Iran were justified as “preparation of the battlefield.”

  The work of soldiers and spies was becoming increasingly blurred. The CIA still had more expansive authorities than the Pentagon to carry out missions anywhere in the world, but after Rumsfeld’s 2004 order it became harder to see r
eal differences between the mission of the military and the mission of the CIA. McChrystal had developed a good rapport with American spies inside of Iraq, but the military’s missions into Iran had not been coordinated with the CIA, and with so many secret operatives crawling around the world’s darkest corners, the lack of coordination created the potential for a major catastrophe.

  —

  OR A MISSED OPPORTUNITY. After Donald Rumsfeld called off the 2005 Bajaur mission in Pakistan because he thought that the hastily planned operation was freighted with too much risk, both the Pentagon and CIA conducted an inquest to figure out what had gone wrong and to make sure the debacle wouldn’t be repeated. The review determined that there were no established procedures in place for authorizing an emergency mission into a country beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon and CIA were carrying out parallel secret operations across the globe, but neither the defense secretary nor the CIA director had the authority to take charge when an opportunity arose to launch a secret mission into a country such as Pakistan. Over the next year, the Pentagon and CIA tried to work out a division of labor, carving up the world and determining who was in charge of each front of the secret war.

  Stephen Cambone led negotiations for the Pentagon, and deputy CIA director Vice Admiral Albert Calland was in charge of the CIA team. Whether the CIA or JSOC would be in charge of secret operations in a particular country depended on a variety of factors: How willing was that country to allow special-operations troops on its soil? What was the strength of the relationship between the CIA and a country’s spy service? Just how prickly might a specific CIA station chief be about ceding control in his country to JSOC?

  Because of the Bajaur episode, Pakistan was at the top of the list for the negotiators. President Musharraf had given his blessing to drone strikes, but he still vehemently opposed American combat operations in the tribal areas. It was fine for things to “fall out of the sky,” but not for them to come marching over the border from Afghanistan. Trying to sell Musharraf on special-operations ground campaigns in places like North Waziristan and Bajaur was, most people in Washington agreed, a hopeless endeavor.

  The CIA proposed a solution. In order to get special-operations troops inside Pakistan, they would simply be turned over to the CIA and operate under Title 50 covert-action authority. Special-operations troops would be “sheep-dipped”—the SEALs would become spies. Special-operations troops would be able to launch operations into Pakistan, and Musharraf would never be told. As one former CIA officer described the arrangement, the special-operations troops “basically became the CIA director’s armed platoon.” The exact same trick would be used six years later, when helicopters carrying teams of Navy SEALs took off from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and crossed the border into Pakistan for the raid that would kill Osama bin Laden. That night, the SEALs were under CIA authority, and CIA director Leon E. Panetta was technically in charge of the mission.

  In other countries, it was JSOC that was in control, and commando missions escalated in countries like the Philippines, where special-operations troops were already posted. In 2006, an American military drone fired missiles at a suspected terror camp in the jungles of the southern Philippines, based on intelligence that Umar Patek, one of the ringleaders of a 2002 terrorist attack in Bali, was hiding at the camp. The missile strike, which the government of Manila announced publicly as a “Philippine military operation,” missed Patek but killed several others. The military was never able to determine how many of them were followers of Umar Patek and how many were women and children.

  The ballooning budgets for special operations also allowed JSOC to buy new eavesdropping equipment that gave commandos the ability to collect intelligence inside Pakistan from the sky. Beechcraft airplanes would regularly take off from airstrips in Afghanistan, fly over the spine of mountains separating Afghanistan and Pakistan, and turn into flying cell-phone towers. Inside the Beechcraft planes, a device called a “Typhoon Box” housed dozens of phone numbers that military spies suspected were used by Pakistani militants. The device could identify when one of the numbers was being used and pinpoint its location. Even if a phone was switched off, JSOC had the ability to turn the phone on; it would then give away the precise coordinates of whoever was carrying it.

  —

  AFTER THE NEW DEALS were struck with the CIA, JSOC operatives that had been “sheep-dipped” and turned into CIA officers could act on the intelligence with ground operations in Pakistan. One year after the mission into Bajaur was scotched, the CIA once again picked up information about a gathering of military leaders, once again in the Bajaur Agency, in the tribal areas.

  The tiny village of Damadola had been under surveillance for some time, since al Qaeda captive Abu Faraj al-Libi told Pakistani intelligence officers he had once met Ayman al-Zawahiri at the house of Bakhptur Khan, a Damadola villager. The CIA had carried out a drone strike in Damadola in January 2006, narrowly missing al-Zawahiri. And, months later, when the intelligence tip came in about another meeting in Damadola, a team of Navy SEALs was sent into the village.

  With the new procedures in place, CIA and military officials took only hours to analyze the intelligence and approve the operation. General John Abizaid, commander of United States Central Command, was in Washington when the CIA received the intelligence tip, and Abizaid jumped into a black SUV and raced to Langley in a motorcade. Shortly after Abizaid and Porter Goss had agreed on the final details of the raid, helicopters took off from Afghanistan and delivered the SEALs over the border into Bajaur.

  The troops stormed the compound, wrestled several people to the floor, and bound them with plastic handcuffs. The prisoners were loaded into the helicopters and brought back into Afghanistan.

  Inside the Counterterrorism Center at Langley, CIA officers gathered around a television screen to watch a video feed from a Predator, which was circling above the compound in Damadola—a staring, unblinking eye allowing spies thousands of miles away to watch the operation unfold. The SEALs captured no senior al Qaeda leaders on the operation. But the Damadola mission proved they could get into Pakistan undetected, conduct a snatch operation, and return to the other side of the border without Pakistan’s government ever being wise to the mission.

  8: A WAR BY PROXY

  “Me and my nation against the world. Me and my clan against my nation. Me and my family against the clan. Me and my brother against the family. Me against my brother.”

  —Somali proverb

  By spring 2006, the CIA operatives in Nairobi, Kenya, were loading unmarked cargo planes with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and AK-47s and flying the shipments to airstrips controlled by Somali warlords. Along with the weapons, they sent suitcases full of cash, about two hundred thousand dollars for each warlord as payment for their services in the fight against terrorism. For a group of men who had been trying to kill one another at various times over the years, the warlords had no qualms about working together once the CIA opened up its coffers. They even managed to come up with a Washington–friendly name for their partnership: the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). The name was unintentionally ironic, given the brutal history of some of the warlords, like Abdi Hasan Awale Qeybdii and Mohamed Qanyare Afrah. Even in parts of the CIA, the group became the butt of jokes. Some American spies compared the acronym ARPCT with SPECTRE, the global terrorist organization from the James Bond films.

  Jose Rodriguez had signed off on a plan developed by spies in Nairobi to escalate a program of running guns and money to the warlords, who had convinced the Americans they would help battle a burgeoning radical threat in the chaotic, impoverished nation.* The collection of warlords, some of the same men who had dispatched gunmen to kill Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos in 1993, had been on the CIA’s payroll in 2002. They had helped the CIA hunt down members of al Qaeda’s East Africa cell, some of whom had been smuggled out of Somalia to CIA black sites. But the covert operation in 2006 was a more formal arrangement,
and it turned into a Washington-sanctioned boondoggle for the warlords.

  The spiraling chaos in Iraq had not only drawn soldiers and spies away from the war in Afghanistan; it had also inspired a new generation of young Muslims to take up arms against the United States. At that time, drafts of a classified intelligence report circulating through American spy agencies laid bare the metastasizing problem of radicalization in the Muslim world. The final report concluded that Iraq had become a “‘cause célèbre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”

  The report, a National Intelligence Estimate, predicted that an increasingly decentralized global jihad movement would splinter even further, with regional militant groups proliferating. The landscape was changing dramatically, and countries in North Africa, East Africa, and impoverished parts of the Arabian Peninsula were becoming increasingly unstable.

  In Yemen, twenty-three militants linked to al Qaeda escaped from a local jail using spoons and broken table legs to dig a tunnel. They likely had help from members of Yemen’s security services who were sympathetic to the prisoners’ cause from the days of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. As one Yemeni official explained the inside job to the New York Times, “You have to remember, these officers used to escort people from Sana’a to Pakistan during the Afghan jihad. People made relationships, and that doesn’t change so easily.” Interpol issued an urgent global alert seeking the arrests of the twenty-three men, but most did not go far. They stayed in Yemen, forming the core of a group that would eventually name itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

  Then there was Somalia, and the rise to prominence of a small, stubby man with almond-shaped eyeglasses and, protruding from his chin, a tuft of hair that he dyed with red henna. Hassan Dahir Aweys led the shura council of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union, a loose federation of clan elders, businessmen, and magnates who had joined together to bring order to Somalia’s chaos by imposing Islamic sharia law. The courts, which for years had been dominated by moderates, were widely popular in Somalia because they offered a reprieve from decades of warlordism. But by late 2005, Aweys’s influence over the ICU had turned the organization into a larger version of his sharia court in the port city of Merca: a platform for preaching an uncompromising brand of Islam that regularly meted out punishments like stoning adulterers and severing the hands of thieves.