The Way of the Knife Page 23

  The United States, he said, too often relied on covert action in a world where secrets were hard to protect and where the hand of the American government was difficult to keep hidden.

  “There are many more overt tools of national power available to attack problems in areas of the world that were previously the place where only covert action could be applicable.”

  He never mentioned the CIA during the speech, but it was unmistakable that his words were directed at the agency, which he had watched amass tremendous power inside the Obama administration. By going public with his concerns Blair had violated one of the Obama administration’s cardinal rules: Keep fights over national security matters inside the family. Even more significant, he was challenging one of the central pillars of President Obama’s foreign policy: using the CIA as an instrument of secret war. Predictably, Leon Panetta and other senior officials at the CIA were incensed when they heard about Blair’s speech. Just over a month later, President Obama fired Dennis Blair.

  The CIA gets what it wants.

  13: THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

  “This is manna from heaven!”

  —Amira

  The MV Faina, a Ukrainian-owned merchant ship, was hugging the coastline of Somalia as it steamed toward Mombasa, Kenya, in September 2008. But it would not reach its final port of call. As it navigated a particularly treacherous stretch of water, more than a dozen armed men swarmed the ship in motorized skiffs, taking hostage the crew of seventeen Ukrainians, three Russians, and one Latvian.

  When they went down into the ship’s hold, the pirates couldn’t believe their luck: The ship was carrying a clandestine cargo of thirty-three Russian T-72 tanks, dozens of boxes of grenades, and an arsenal of antiaircraft guns. The pirates had no way of knowing it, but the cargo had been part of a secret effort by Kenya’s government to arm militias in southern Sudan in their fight against the government in Khartoum—a violation of a UN arms embargo. The Somali pirates had become experts in setting ransoms based on the value of their cargo, and soon after the ship’s capture they began demanding as much as $35 million for a safe release of the crew, the ship, and its sensitive cargo.

  American Navy vessels surrounded the ship within days, and helicopters flew over the Faina’s deck in an attempt to assess the health of the crew. But the hostage negotiations dragged on for weeks as the Ukrainian ship owners refused to cave to the pirates’ demands. Frustrated by the lack of progress, the pirates decided they wanted a new mediator for the negotiations. They scrawled a message onto a white sheet and draped it over the Faina’s railing.

  The message was just one word long: AMIRA.

  Within days, Michele “Amira” Ballarin was at the center of the tense hostage negotiations with a group of pirates holding a ship full of Russian tanks. By the time the pirates made their demand, Ballarin had already been working with a group of Somali clan elders to negotiate the ransom and end the standoff, although she would later deny that she had any financial interest in the negotiations. Her interest was purely humanitarian, she said, providing satellite phones so that pirates could communicate with Somali elders on shore and so the Faina’s crew could communicate with their families. But the ship’s Ukrainian owners grew angry about the meddling of this strange woman from Virginia. Hers was an unwanted presence; they figured she was only driving up the price of getting their crew and cargo released. “She has to understand that offering criminals a huge amount of money, which by the way she doesn’t have—she is only giving them false hope,” said a company spokesman.

  Ukraine’s government even intervened. In early February 2009, just weeks after the Obama administration took office, Ukraine foreign minister Volodymyr Ohryzko wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the woman who, he said with a flourish, had “become an intermediary of the sea corsairs.” Ballarin’s actions, the Ukrainian minister went on, “incite the pirates to the groundless increase of the ransom sum,” and he asked Clinton “to facilitate the exclusion of [her] from the negotiation process with the pirates.”

  Hillary Clinton would have had no reason to know who Michele Ballarin was before receiving the letter from the Ukrainian minister, but plenty of other American officials did. By the time President Obama came into office, Ballarin had been given a contract with the Pentagon to gather intelligence inside Somalia, just one of the myriad projects for which she had tried to gain the approval of the United States government, with varying degrees of success.

  Her efforts back in 2006 to organize a Sufi resistance to fight al Shabaab hadn’t yet panned out, but she wasn’t deterred. Using a number of different front companies with vague and portentous names like BlackStar, Archangel, and the Gulf Security Group, she hatched several new ventures designed to make her an indispensable partner to the American military and intelligence services. She converted a historic hotel in rural Virginia into a secure facility—with reinforced walls and encrypted locks—that she hoped the CIA or Pentagon might use to store classified information. She was unsuccessful in getting any government agencies to rent the space.

  She hired a number of retired American military officers and spies, including former CIA officer Ross Newland who had left the spy agency to become a consultant, to help her get meetings with senior members of Washington’s national security establishment. Working with a former Army sergeant major named Perry Davis, a stocky retired Green Beret with years of military service in Southeast Asia, Ballarin briefly considered the idea of scouting for bases on remote islands in the Philippines and Indonesia she thought could be used to train indigenous troops for clandestine counterterrorist missions, but mostly she kept her focus on Africa.

  In August 2007, she wrote a letter to the CIA in which she announced herself as the president of Gulf Security Group, a company based in the United Arab Emirates with a “singular objective”: hunting and killing “Al Qai’da terrorist networks, infrastructure and personnel in the Horn of Africa.”

  The letter went on:

  “Gulf Security Group is owned and controlled by the undersigned United States citizens with no foreign interests or influence. We have deep relationships with indigenous clans and political leaders in Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and throughout the Horn of Africa, including the Islamic Courts Union, and those who control their militant and jihadist activities. These relationships will enable successful mission outcome without fingerprint, footprint or flag, and provide total deniability.”

  To such a breathtaking proposal, a CIA lawyer sent back a terse response. “The CIA is not interested in your unsolicited proposal and does not authorize you to undertake any activities on its behalf. I am returning your proposal,” wrote John L. McPherson, the agency’s associate general counsel. Ballarin’s proposal to cobble together indigenous hit squads, McPherson wrote, might violate the Neutrality Act, a law that prohibits private citizens from raising private overseas armies.

  As far-fetched as her offer seemed, Ballarin might just have had bad timing. Just a year earlier the CIA was still paying Erik Prince and Enrique Prado for their roles in the killing program that had been outsourced to Blackwater employees. But the agency had decided in the middle of 2006 that the Blackwater program should be shuttered, exactly because of the concerns raised in McPherson’s letter about the propriety of hiring private citizens to play a part in targeted-killing operations. The CIA wasn’t about to entertain a similar proposal from a mysterious woman with no track record of participating in clandestine operations.

  Having been denied the opportunity to kill for the CIA, Ballarin next proposed spying for the military. In this, she had greater success. In the spring of 2008, Ballarin and Perry Davis arrived at a nondescript office building across from the Pentagon, where they had a meeting at the headquarters of the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office. The CTTSO is a small outfit with a modest budget for giving seed money to classified military counterterrorism programs, and a contact inside the Pentagon had helped set up the meeting for Ballarin. But few insid
e the CTTSO office knew the first thing about the well-dressed woman standing before them. Introducing herself as the head of a company called BlackStar, Ballarin was blunt.

  “I’m going to fix Somalia,” she said.

  Ballarin and Davis outlined a plan to set up a humanitarian food program that would be a cover to collect intelligence. Pallets of food aid would arrive by ship at a Somali port, be loaded onto trucks, and be driven to aid stations her team was planning to set up around the country. According to the plan, the Somalis who arrived at the food stations would give their names and other identifying information, and in return they would receive identification cards. The information gathered at the food stations, Ballarin told the military officials, could be fed into Pentagon databases and used both to map Somalia’s complex tribal structure and, possibly, to help the United States hunt the leaders of al Shabaab.

  Ballarin said she would fund much of the program out of her own pocket but was looking for both the Pentagon’s blessing and additional funding. Ballarin and Davis gave few specifics about how they intended to make the operation work, but they managed to sell the plan. Shortly afterward, the Pentagon office promised BlackStar an initial sum of approximately $200,000, with a pledge for more if the program began to show promise. For the first time, Michele Ballarin had received the American government’s imprimatur for clandestine work in Africa.

  —

  A NUMBER OF FACTORS had converged to pave Michele Ballarin’s path for the intelligence-gathering operation in Somalia. The first, and most obvious, was the lack of any solid information about a country that some in Washington had vague fears about becoming a terror state in the mold of Afghanistan as it was before the September 11 attacks. The CIA was consumed by the drone war in Pakistan and supporting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving the agency with few resources for spying inside Somalia. Besides, with the CIA still feeling burned by 2006’s disastrous covert campaign with warlords there, few in Langley had much interest at the time in wading back into the Somali muck. They also weren’t sure it was worth it: During his exit interview with reporters at the end of the Bush administration, CIA director Michael Hayden dismissed the al Shabaab movement as insignificant.

  At the same time, however, the Pentagon was beginning a push to escalate clandestine activities throughout Africa: from the Horn, across the Arab states of the northern part of the continent, to western countries like Nigeria. The creation of U.S. Africa Command in the fall of 2008, the Pentagon’s first military headquarters devoted exclusively to operations in Africa, was another sign of increased attention to the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent, after years of relative neglect. The Pentagon had a brand new military command post in Stuttgart, Germany—but not the intelligence to support any operations.

  Nor a clear idea about exactly whom to support inside Somalia. Just months after President Obama took office, the new administration announced a decision to ship forty tons of weapons and ammunition to Somalia’s embattled Transitional Federal Government, the United Nations–backed government that was considered by Somalis to be as corrupt as it was weak. By 2009 the TFG already controlled little territory beyond several square miles inside Mogadishu, and President Obama’s team was in a panic over the possibility that an al Shabaab offensive in the capital might push the government out of central Mogadishu. With an embargo in place prohibiting foreign weapons from flooding into Somalia, the administration had to get the UN’s approval for the arms shipments. The first weapons delivery arrived in June 2009, but Somali government troops didn’t keep them for long. Instead, they sold the weapons that Washington had purchased for them in Mogadishu weapons bazaars. The arms market collapsed, and a new supply of cheap weapons was made available to al Shabaab fighters. By the end of the summer, American-made M16s could be found at the bazaars for just ninety-five dollars, and a more coveted AK-47 could be purchased for just five dollars more.

  Clearly, the campaign in the Horn of Africa was still being waged in a haphazard and scattershot manner, with the United States conducting an outsourced war using proxy forces and warlords. Somalia was considered a threat, but not enough of a peril to merit an American military campaign there. So the doors opened for contractors like Ballarin who offered to fill the intelligence void, just as Dewey Clarridge had done for Pakistan.

  Somalia was slowly turning into a haven for all manner of clandestine operations: from the secret counterterrorism missions of Western governments to wild schemes by contractors to chase pirates. One such plan was hatched with the help of Erik Prince, former head of the beleaguered Blackwater Worldwide, who had left the United States to begin a new chapter in the United Arab Emirates. There, he said, it would be hard for the “jackals”—trial lawyers and congressional investigators—to hound him and go after his money. Besides a secret project to help the UAE build a mercenary army of Colombian soldiers, an army that Emirati officials envisioned could be dispatched to put down domestic unrest in the country and even deter attacks from Iran, Prince began working with a group of South African mercenaries to help build a counterpiracy force in northern Somalia.

  The UAE had grown worried about the pirates off the Horn of Africa who were picking off ships going to and from the Persian Gulf, and Emirati officials and Prince worked to develop a new strategy for combating piracy: Instead of trying to challenge the pirates on the high seas, a new militia would carry out raids in the pirate dens on land. Never one to dodge controversy, Prince met with officials from a South African company called Saracen International, a private security firm at the time run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s apartheid-era Civil Cooperation Bureau. The CCB had a brutal record of carrying out assassinations and intimidating black South Africans, and after the fall of apartheid, many of its former members became guns for hire in the myriad civil wars of the African continent. The counterpiracy operation was just the latest below-the-radar adventure for Luitingh and the South African mercenaries in a part of the world that was still very much ignored.

  Besides the efforts of private companies, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command began paying greater attention to fighting a stealth war against militants in Somalia. Just as he had proposed for Yemen, Admiral William McRaven at JSOC discussed with officials in Washington a plan for a full-fledged special-operations task force for Somalia, modeled after the task force in Iraq that had eviscerated the al Qaeda affiliate there: Navy SEAL snatch-and-grab and prisoner interrogations in al Shabaab–held territories to dismantle the group.

  Somalia was, compared with Yemen and Pakistan, both an easier and a more difficult environment for a clandestine war. Unlike Pakistan and Yemen, there was no central government for the Americans to work with, and no local intelligence service that could penetrate al Shabaab. On the other hand, Somalia presented none of the headaches of having to ask permission before the United States carried out a targeted-killing operation. There was no Ali Abdullah Saleh or Pervez Musharraf who needed to be courted, no secret cash payments for the right to wage war inside another country. Somalia was, as one senior military officer involved in planning Horn of Africa operations put it, “a complete free-fire zone.”

  But the JSOC proposals found little support. The baggage of the Black Hawk Down episode still weighed down any discussion of counterterrorism operations in Somalia, and the White House ultimately rejected Admiral McRaven’s ambitious proposals, insisting that each military operation inside Somalia be approved personally by the president. Obama administration lawyers even debated whether al Shabaab, which had not carried out acts of terrorism against the United States, could be a target. Was the group a threat to America or a local militia that Washington should simply ignore?

  It was sometimes hard to take the group seriously. Even as it tried to blanket Mogadishu under strict sharia law, ordering that thieves have their hands chopped off and adulterers be stoned to death, al Shabaab also engaged in erratic and even comic behavior. Al S
habaab leaders would make strange pronouncements in desperate attempts to gain new recruits. They held a talent show in the vein of the television program American Idol and a trivia game for children between the ages of ten and seventeen where contestants were asked questions like, “In which war was our leader Sheikh Timajilic killed?” First prize was an AK-47 assault rifle. After the U.S. State Department offered cash rewards for the whereabouts of al Shabaab leaders, one top al Shabaab operative told thousands of Somalis gathered after their Friday prayers that the militant group was offering rewards of its own for information about the “hideouts” of top American officials. The person who helped lead al Shabaab to the “idiot Obama” would be rewarded with ten camels. Ten chickens and ten roosters would go to the person with information about the hideout of the “old woman Hillary Clinton.”

  With few options for detaining terror suspects, and little appetite for extensive ground operations in Somalia, killing sometimes was a far more appealing option than capturing. In September 2009, JSOC scored an intelligence coup: precise information on the whereabouts of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan member of al Qaeda’s East Africa cell, which had carried out the 1998 American-embassy attacks, and a man thought to be the liaison between al Qaeda and al Shabaab. The intelligence indicated that, after months of moving inside cities and towns that made American airstrikes impossible, Nabhan was set to travel in a truck convoy from Mogadishu to the seaside town of Barawa. During a videoconference connecting the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and JSOC headquarters at Fort Bragg, Admiral McRaven led the group through the various strike options. The option carrying the least risk was to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from a ship off the coast, or missiles from a military plane. Alternatively, McRaven said, Navy SEALs flying in AH-6 helicopters could swoop in on the convoy, kill Nabhan, and collect enough DNA evidence at the scene to confirm his death. Finally, McRaven presented a variation on option two: Instead of killing Nabhan, the SEALs would snatch him, put him into one of the helicopters, and take him somewhere for interrogation. President Obama chose what was thought to be the least risky option: a missile strike on the convoy.