The Way of the Knife Read online

  “The money ends up in Swiss bank accounts,” Prince bin Nayef told Holbrooke.

  Instead, the Saudi government had begun paying for development projects in areas of Yemen where al Qaeda militants had put down roots, in the hope that the projects might drain away support for extremists and “persuade Yemenis to see extremists as criminals rather than heroes.” At the end of their meeting, Holbrooke promised the prince that President Obama would work with the kingdom to dismantle al Qaeda’s growing network in Yemen.

  It was a stroke of luck, bin Nayef figured, when Abdullah al-Asiri contacted the Saudis three months later with his offer to surrender. Al-Asiri was one of eighty-five militants associated with “deviant groups” that the Saudis had been hunting, as was the young man’s older brother Ibrahim. Ibrahim had been arrested for trying to join the insurgency in Iraq in 2003, and his time in prison in Saudi Arabia had kindled in him a hatred for the kingdom and its alliance with the United States, which he likened to the relationship between master and slave. Of the two brothers, it was Ibrahim whom the Saudis considered far more dangerous; he had been trained as a bomb maker, with a sinister gift for finding creative ways to hide explosives. Conscious that the Saudis might suspect the planned “surrender” was an elaborate subterfuge for the al-Asiri brothers to take revenge against Prince bin Nayef, Ibrahim devised a bomb that could evade standard security precautions. Shortly before the younger al-Asiri boarded the Saudi royal’s jet for the flight to Jeddah, Ibrahim had a bomb of pentaerythritol tetranitrate—a type of plastic explosive—implanted in Abdullah’s rectum.

  But for all of Ibrahim’s genius as a bomb maker, his lethal plots were often undone by the incompetence of his bombers. His brother had traveled with the hidden explosive from Yemen to Jeddah and arrived without incident at Prince bin Nayef’s palace. After the nervous Abdullah al-Asiri entered the room where the prince was receiving visitors, he reached into his robe to trigger the explosives but set the bomb off too early, before he was close enough to the prince. The explosion blew al-Asiri in half, leaving a smoking crater on the tiled floor and bloodstains throughout the room. Prince bin Nayef received only minor wounds from the blast.

  The attack was a failure. But al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had managed to carry out its first operation outside of Yemen. If the group was embarrassed by the clumsiness of its assassin, it gave no indication in a boastful message it released shortly after the attack. It was the Saudis who should be embarrassed, the statement read, because Abdullah al-Asiri’s security breach was the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia’s history, and the militant group was in the process of uprooting a Saudi spy network in Yemen that the royal family had set up to infiltrate AQAP.

  For those in Riyadh now living in fear, and those in Washington now paying attention, the statement promised more attacks to come:

  “Oh tyrants, rest assured that you will suffer, because your fortress won’t be able to protect you from us.

  “We will reach you soon.”

  —

  THE DAY AFTER Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States, Prince bin Nayef received a call from an old friend in Washington. The man on the other end of the phone was John Brennan, a former top CIA officer who had advised Senator Obama during the campaign and had been tapped as Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser in the White House. It wasn’t the job Brennan had wanted. At the end of the presidential campaign he was assumed to be the leading candidate to take over the CIA, were Obama elected. He had the right credentials: A son of Irish immigrants, Brennan was raised in New Jersey and attended Fordham University; he had spent decades as a CIA analyst and spoke fluent Arabic. He even had the rare experience of serving as a CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s, despite being an analyst, not an undercover case officer. A large man with a face that looked like it had been carved from a slab of limestone, Brennan had the appearance of a Depression-era boxer.

  But his dream of taking over the CIA was thwarted during Obama’s transition, when remarks he had made—seeming to endorse the brutal interrogation methods the CIA had used in secret prisons—resurfaced and were criticized by human-rights activists. Brennan had been among George Tenet’s top advisers when the prison program was put in place, in 2002, and therefore was closely tethered to a program that Obama had frequently said was a dark stain on America’s record since the September 11 attacks. Fearing a lengthy and distracting confirmation battle in the Senate, Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for the CIA job.

  The position in the White House may have been a consolation prize, but in a short time Brennan would turn his windowless basement office in the West Wing into an operations hub for the clandestine wars that President Obama would champion as president. Obama’s desire to manage aspects of the targeted-killing program directly from the White House gave Brennan a role unique in the history of American government: one part executioner, one part chief confessor to the president, one part public spokesman sent out to justify the Obama doctrine of killing off America’s enemies in remote parts of the world.

  When Brennan called bin Nayef that day in January 2009, he pledged to the man he had come to know well since his days in Riyadh that President Obama was just as committed to hunting and killing terrorists as President Bush had been. During the transition after Obama’s election, Brennan and the other senior members of Obama’s national-security team had been briefed over two days at CIA headquarters, where top agency officials ran through the list of covert-action programs on the books. The head of the Counterterrorism Center, the undercover officer with the first name Mike, told the group that President Bush had accelerated the pace of drone strikes the previous summer and that the CIA was trying to get more spies into Pakistan. During the presidential campaign, Obama had repeatedly pledged that he would focus attention on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden—a renewed emphasis on the so-called “good war” that Bush had ignored by starting the “bad war” in Iraq. At the meetings, Brennan told Mike and Stephen Kappes, the deputy CIA director whom Obama had asked to stay in his job at Langley, that the drone killings in Pakistan were likely to continue under Obama’s watch.

  There was another reason that Obama, Brennan, and other senior members of the new administration would come to rely on targeted killing as an important instrument of counterterrorism. During the campaign, Obama had often spoken about how the secret detentions and interrogation techniques of the Bush era had sullied America’s image, and during his first week in office he announced a plan to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay and ban all of the coercive interrogation methods used by the CIA since the September 11 attacks. The decision was immediately denounced by Dick Cheney, the former vice president, as a cynical move by a callow president playing politics at the expense of national security. If there was a major terrorist attack while Obama was president, Cheney warned, it would be Obama’s fault for denying the CIA the tools it needed to keep the country safe.

  Cheney’s vituperative comments, coming immediately after he left the White House, were a significant breach of the standard protocol that an outgoing administration doesn’t criticize the incoming president—at least in the early months. But the Cheney critique was meant as a warning shot, a signal that any evidence of Barack Obama being “weak” on national security issues would become grist for partisan attacks against the new president.

  As he sat in the meetings with the new team, John Rizzo, a career CIA lawyer who had achieved a degree of infamy for his role in getting Justice Department approval for the CIA’s detention-and-interrogation program, was struck by the hawkish tone of Obama’s aides. “They never came out and said they would start killing people because they couldn’t interrogate them, but the implication was unmistakable,” Rizzo said. “Once the interrogation was gone, all that was left was the killing.”

  The options for interrogating prisoners weren’t, as Rizzo said, “gone.” But interrogation and detention had clearly become a briar p
atch for the new administration: Besides the decision to shut Guantánamo Bay within a year, there were also concerns among Obama’s team that capturing prisoners and handing them over to foreign governments could ignite liberal criticism that the administration was outsourcing torture. At the same time, no prominent member of President Obama’s own party had criticized drone strikes, and Republicans were hardly in a position to challenge the new president for fighting too aggressive a campaign against terrorists. The political conditions were set for an escalation of the secret wars.

  The meetings over two days at Langley were the first sign that President Obama planned to rely on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command in ways that not even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had, as America’s primary tool to conduct lethal operations. Seven years after the September 11 attacks, the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan had exhausted the American public and drained the American purse. More important, though, the tools of secret war had been calibrated and refined during that period, and Obama’s team thought they saw an opportunity to wage war without the staggering costs of the big military campaigns that topple governments, require years of occupation, and catalyze radicalization throughout the Muslim world. As Brennan described the Obama administration’s approach during one speech, the United States could use a “scalpel” rather than a “hammer” to carry out war beyond war zones.

  Obama wasn’t the first liberal Democratic president to embrace black operations. John F. Kennedy gave final approval for the Bay of Pigs operation and ramped up covert operations in Vietnam. And, for all the time that Jimmy Carter spent railing against CIA adventures as a presidential candidate, he ended up authorizing a string of covert actions during his final two years in the White House.

  But Barack Obama was also the first president to enter the White House who had come of age after the Vietnam War and the roiling events of the 1960s and 1970s that had fostered cynicism among an earlier generation about the CIA and, more broadly, about the use of American power overseas. In one 2010 interview, Obama told reporter Bob Woodward that he was “probably the first president who is young enough that the Vietnam War wasn’t at the core of my development,” and so he grew up with “none of the baggage that arose out of the dispute of the Vietnam War.” It was an answer to a question about the tensions between the military and civilians during the Vietnam era, but clearly Obama also had a view of the CIA that was generationally different from that of baby boomers like Bill Clinton.

  The CIA’s ascendancy during the Obama administration wasn’t just about the age of the man sitting in the Oval Office, or about the nature of the threats Obama learned about each day during his intelligence briefing. It also had to do with the fact that Obama’s first CIA director turned out to be, in terms of his ability to advance the spy agency’s interests inside the executive branch, the most influential CIA director since William Casey during the Reagan administration.

  —

  LEON E. PANETTA SEEMED at first an extremely unlikely choice to take over the CIA. He had no professional background in intelligence or military affairs outside of a two-year Army stint in the 1960s. During his years as a Democratic congressman representing a coastal pocket of Northern California, he never served on the committees overseeing either the Pentagon or the CIA. He was outwardly warm and avuncular but also a fierce backroom negotiator and fighter who slung four-letter words around a room as frequently as he did prepositions. He had had glancing contact with the intelligence world during his time as President Clinton’s chief of staff, but that had been a very different era and a very different CIA.

  When Panetta took over as CIA director, he had literally no idea that the CIA was killing people around the world. By early 2009, the CIA’s targeted-killing campaign using drones in Pakistan was being extensively reported in the press. And yet, incredibly, Panetta was shocked to learn during his initial briefings for the CIA job that he would be, in effect, a military commander for a secret war. “He was a total blank slate on intelligence issues when he walked into the door at Langley,” said Rizzo, who had helped prepare a set of briefings for Panetta before his Senate confirmation hearings. But what he lacked in tangible experience in issues of life and death he made up for in Washington savvy. Panetta had two of the qualities the ever-paranoid CIA looked for in a director: clout and respect within the White House and a willingness to defend the CIA’s turf against the agency’s perceived enemies in Washington.

  Both of these qualities were tested immediately, after White House officials decided to end a long-standing legal battle and declassify the internal memos authorizing the CIA’s interrogation methods during the early years of the Bush administration. Panetta had already made his views on the interrogation methods known during his confirmation hearings, saying unequivocally that they were nothing short of “torture.” The statement had sent shocks through parts of the CIA’s clandestine service and created suspicions that the new CIA director was going to be the second coming of Stansfield Turner, an outsider that a liberal president sent out to Langley to rein in what the White House believed was a spy agency out of control.

  But the very opposite happened. Panetta became a CIA champion, beloved by many at Langley but criticized by others who said that, like so many CIA directors before him, he had been co-opted by the agency’s clandestine branch. Within a month of his arrival he had managed to delay the release of the interrogation memos and forced a debate inside the White House about the propriety of spilling all the details of the defunct prison program.

  Panetta had by that time experienced firsthand the influence that the CIA’s Directorate of Operations has over spy chiefs at Langley. Both Stephen Kappes and officers at the Counterterrorism Center warned him that releasing the memos would devastate morale inside the CTC. The warning came with an implied threat: He risked permanently losing the support of the agency’s clandestine workforce before he had even figured out how to get from his office to the CIA cafeteria. Panetta had spent enough time in Washington to know the implications of what he was hearing. He risked becoming another John Deutch or Porter Goss, men who had clashed with the Directorate of Operations and found their tenure at the agency to be nasty, brutish, and short. Panetta was sold.

  He was on his first overseas trip as CIA director when he learned about the White House’s plans to declassify and release the interrogation memos—complying with a federal judge’s order in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. He immediately called Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and urged him to put off the release. The two men had known each other from the Clinton White House, and it was Emanuel who had pushed for Panetta’s appointment to the CIA. Emanuel went along with Panetta’s request, and in the weeks that followed, Panetta made an impassioned case at the White House for keeping the memos secret, winning Emanuel over to his side. It was a curious, almost otherworldly moment: A man who had publicly accused the CIA of breaking American law by committing acts of torture was forcefully arguing that the details of those acts be kept secret from the public.

  Panetta ultimately lost the debate, and President Obama ordered that the memos be released. But it hardly mattered for the new CIA director. By insisting that the White House at least debate the issue, he had proved to the agency’s rank and file that he had clout inside the new administration. More important, he had gone to the mat on an issue that was deeply important to the clandestine service. He had shown, as many inside the CIA saw it, that he was part of the team.

  —

  IT WAS ANOTHER MATTER entirely for the man who, at least on paper, was Leon Panetta’s boss. Admiral Dennis Blair, who had been sent to the CIA during the Clinton administration to serve as a liaison to the Pentagon, had vaulted up the Navy’s senior ranks in the years since and ended his military career as a four-star admiral in charge of the U.S. Pacific Command. The job had given him oversight of more than a third of the earth’s surface, and his orders were obeyed by troops spread across hundreds of
thousands of square miles. But Blair, now retired from the military, was taking over a job that remained ill defined four years after the Bush administration created the Director of National Intelligence position under pressure from Congress and the 9/11 Commission to account for the intelligence failures preceding the September 11 attacks and the Iraq war. Some had envisioned the intelligence post to be a powerful job, riding herd over a fractious collection of spy agencies housed in different departments. But Donald Rumsfeld’s allies in Congress were successful in neutering the new position, and the Pentagon retained much of the intelligence community’s budget. These bureaucratic knife fights meant that by the time Blair took over the post in early 2009 both the Pentagon and the CIA had ensured that he would be little more than a figurehead.

  Making things worse, Blair saw right away that he was an outsider in a close-knit group of advisers who had been with President Obama through much of the grueling campaign—a group Blair referred to disparagingly as the “Long Marchers,” in reference to the military retreat over thousands of miles by the Chinese Communists in 1934. His suspicions were borne out during an early scrape with Panetta. Blair began pushing for the authority to appoint the senior American spy in each country overseas, a designation that by tradition automatically went to the CIA’s chief of station. It was a relatively minor issue, but Panetta and his deputy, Stephen Kappes, saw it as a threat to the CIA’s authority and lobbied the White House to reject Blair’s plan. With the proposal languishing at the White House during the summer of 2009, Blair decided he didn’t need to wait for a White House decision and issued an order directing the change. He informed Panetta about his decision during a short, tense phone call. Panetta slammed down the phone.