The Way of the Knife Read online

  But things didn’t go as planned. With JSOC making final preparations for the operation, code-named Celestial Balance, the missile-launcher malfunctioned on the plane that had been designated for the mission. With time running out and Nabhan on the move, McRaven ordered that the commandos carry out the fallback plan: The SEALs waiting on a Navy ship off the Somali coast loaded into the helicopters and headed west, into Somali airspace. The helicopters strafed the convoy, killing Nabhan and three al Shabaab operatives.

  The operation was a success in Somalia, but for some involved in the mission planning, the entire episode had raised uncomfortable questions. Because Plan A had failed, the United States was forced to take the extraordinary step of using troops in one of the most hostile countries in the world. But once the troops were there, why didn’t they just capture Nabhan instead of kill him? Part of the answer was that a capture mission was considered too risky. But that wasn’t the only reason. Killing was the preferred course of action in Somalia, and as one person involved in the mission planning put it, “We didn’t capture him because it would have been hard to find a place to put him.”

  —

  THE PENTAGON had originally hired Michele Ballarin and Perry Davis to come up with the type of information that had led to Nabhan’s killing. This gave Ballarin clout during her frequent trips to East Africa, where she boasted about her ties to the American government during private meetings with various Somali factions. Each trip brought new business opportunities, and as Somalia emerged as the world’s epicenter of international piracy, she saw the windfall that could come from acting as an intermediary in the ransom negotiations. Ballarin’s primary contact from the Pentagon office that awarded her the contract had pushed her to develop relations with the clans in Somalia with close ties to the pirate networks, and by the time the pirates displayed the AMIRA sign from the Faina’s hull she had designs on becoming the go-to ransom negotiator. She said publicly that her interests in negotiating were purely humanitarian, but privately Ballarin told some of her employees that taking a cut of the ransom payments could be lucrative as the scourge of piracy worsened. “She had this dream of handling all of the negotiations, and getting rich,” said Bill Deininger, a former colleague. In one interview she told a reporter that her goal was to “unwind all seventeen ships and all four hundred fifty people” that Somali pirates were currently holding.

  Deininger was one of a number of disgruntled former employees who became disillusioned with Ballarin and quit working for her when they thought she had failed to deliver on her many promises. Some retired military officers she had hired to work for her various companies put up some of their own money when they joined Ballarin’s service, and felt burned when they didn’t recoup their investment. Although the Pentagon gave her seed money for her information-gathering project in 2008, she struggled to get a steady stream of money from government contracts, and cut ties with many of her partners.

  And yet she maintained the appearance of a lavish lifestyle in the rolling hills of Virginia beyond the Washington beltway. She continued to court senior American military and intelligence officials, often at the large brick mansion that she rented, which doubled as an antiques store and sat on 110 acres that was once the domain of horse farms but more recently had become part of Washington’s sprawling exurbs. She entertained American and African officials in the mansion’s dining room, a space decorated with antique vases, hunting prints, and a large gallery of photos of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Bedecked in jewelry and sometimes caressing a string of prayer beads, she presided over the meetings at the head of a large antique table. At regular intervals, Perry Davis would get up and refill visitors’ teacups with a sweet blend of Kenyan black tea with cardamom, cloves, and other spices.

  Ballarin continued to make trips to East Africa, building up ties to factions inside Somalia united by their adherence to Sufism. And she eventually developed a catchphrase for her work inside Somalia: She was providing “organic solutions” to problems that had festered for decades, solutions that couldn’t be enacted by foreign governments or what she saw as meddlesome outside groups like the United Nations. During an interview with the Voice of America she spoke about a “soft-sided” approach, eschewing violence.

  “The Somalis have seen enough conflict, they’ve seen enough private military companies, they’ve seen bloodshed, they’ve seen enough gunpowder, they’ve seen enough bullets,” she said. “All the ugly things that have created a generation of young people who don’t know anything else. Why would anyone who cares deeply about this culture want to perpetuate that? It’s not the way forward; it really isn’t.”

  But her definition of an “organic solution” was clearly elastic. In 2009, for example, she tried to help a group of Somali hit men kill five prominent al Shabaab operatives who were gathering for a meeting in Mogadishu. All they needed, she said, were silencers for their handguns.

  In her telling of the story, the details of which a former American government official confirmed, she was sitting in her suite at the Djibouti Palace Kempinski, the only five-star hotel in the tiny, impoverished nation. The hotel was hosting an international conference to select the next leaders of Somalia’s anemic transitional government—a literal gathering of the clans. After negotiations in conference rooms and poolside, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate, former commander of the Islamic Courts Union, was chosen to run the country.

  In the middle of one night, a group of Somalis knocked on Ballarin’s door and took her to meet a senior official of Somalia’s new transitional government. There, the Somali official told her that he had been in contact with a senior al Shabaab operative who was interested in switching sides and joining the government. The informant knew about an upcoming gathering of al Shabaab leaders and was offering—with America’s blessing—to kill them all.

  His list of needs was short: His men would need some training with handguns, and silencers to ensure that the operation could be carried out as discreetly as possible. And the defector wanted the United States to put up money to help the widows and children of the slain al Shabaab leaders.

  When Ballarin returned to the United States, she and Perry Davis contacted a small group of military officers they knew at the Pentagon. As she saw it, this was not a difficult decision, and she later recalled with a measure of anger what she told the military officials with whom she had met.

  “This is manna from heaven! Take it!” she recalled telling the military men.

  But the Americans balked. If JSOC was going to bless the operation, the Americans were going to do it themselves. But Ballarin thought that having Somalis—rather than American commandos or other foreign proxies—kill the top echelon of al Shabaab in one blow would be especially crippling for an indigenous terror organization.

  “This is an organic solution,” she said. “You don’t dispatch SEAL teams. This is Somali-style, and this isn’t pleasant stuff we’re talking about.”

  When she recalled the episode several years later, she spoke wistfully about what might have been.

  “All they wanted was silencers.”

  Ballarin wasn’t content with playing the role of mere passive collector of intelligence. Her vision was to be at the center of a great Sufi awakening, overseeing the unification of various Sufi groups across North and East Africa in a forceful campaign against Wahhabism. When al Shabaab militants took over radio stations in Mogadishu, banning music and forcing radio programmers to introduce news reports with the sounds of canned gunfire, bleating goats, and clucking chickens, Ballarin wrote a song of resistance to the Sufis of Somalia. The song, written in English and sung by a Brazilian pop singer, carried the rallying cry “Sufi life they’ll never defeat!”

  Raise your voices . . . Take a stand!

  Reclaim our honor and our land

  From foreign powers and meddling hands.

  Brothers and sisters, take a stand!

  Raise your voices . . . Take a stand!

  From regional
strings . . . international bans.

  Brother, come with me . . . man for man.

  Brothers and sisters . . . take a stand!

  Ballarin believed that the great awakening should begin in Somalia, where she had already had contacts with Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a (ASWJ), a Sufi group that controls large swaths of territory in central Somalia. The ASWJ had a somewhat checkered history. During the Somali civil war that raged during the 1990s, the group was aligned with the same warlord who commanded the Somali gunmen fighting Army Rangers and Delta Force operatives during the Black Hawk Down episode. Before the rise of al Shabaab, the ASWJ had not wielded significant influence in Somalia’s clan wars. But as al Shabaab fighters began capturing towns in southern and central Somalia, the Wahhabi gunmen made a point of destroying Sufi graves and mosques wherever they went. Bones were exhumed and left to bleach in the sun, and caretakers of graveyards were arrested or told never to return to work. Al Shabaab fighters said that the gravesites were overwrought memorials—idolatry that was banned by Islam. Sheikh Hassan Yaqub Ali, the al Shabaab spokesman in the southern port city of Kismayo, told the BBC, “It is forbidden to make graves into shrines.”

  The grave desecration ignited a militant strain within the largely peaceful ASWJ, and they began to mobilize into an armed group with the aim of acting as a counterweight to al Shabaab. Recognizing the potential of a Sufi armed awakening, Ballarin began encouraging Sufi leaders to develop a strategy to break al Shabaab’s advance. She and Perry Davis spoke repeatedly with Sufi sheikhs and ASWJ military leaders, traveling to central Somalia to talk about their military campaign, acting like a two-person battlefield staff. Ballarin and Davis boasted to Americans that the ASWJ was like their own private militia, and that they had instructed the Sufi fighters in how to recover weapons off the battlefield and store ammunition.

  Then, after months of stalemate, ragtag columns of gun-wielding ASWJ fighters moved into El Buur, an al Shabaab stronghold in central Somalia. Ballarin beams when she recalls a text message she said she received in the middle of the night from ASWJ commanders:

  “We’ve taken El Buur!”

  —

  SITTING IN FRONT OF the television in her brick mansion in Northern Virginia in 2011, watching video feeds on Fox News of the Arab revolts across North Africa, Michele Ballarin didn’t see a hopeful Arab “spring.” She saw a nightmare unfolding: radical Wahhabi Islam cutting across northern Africa all the way to the west coast of the continent. In her mind, authoritarian governments in places like Egypt and Libya had been a bulwark against the spread of Wahhabism, and the fortifications were now crumbling. She was certain that Wahhabism’s rich patrons in Saudi Arabia would move into the region with money to build mosques and religious schools, and that the United States was losing its only partners in a fight against radical Islam. As she saw it, Muammar Gaddafi might have been a ruthless thug and the enemy of her hero Ronald Reagan, but to her, the Libyan dictator had come to be on the side of the righteous in the age’s defining struggle of good versus evil.

  Like a desert sandstorm, the popular revolts spreading across the states of North Africa were in the process of burying decades of authoritarian rule. But they had also caught the CIA flat-footed, and White House officials were aware that for all of the billions of dollars that the United States spends each year to collect intelligence and forecast the world’s cataclysmic events, American spy agencies were several steps behind the popular uprisings. “The CIA missed Tunisia. They missed Egypt. They missed Libya. They missed them individually, and they missed them collectively,” said one senior member of the Obama administration. In the frantic weeks after the Arab revolts began, hundreds of intelligence analysts at the CIA and other American spy agencies were reassigned to divine meaning from the turmoil. It was a game of catch-up.

  It was the first mass uprising of the social-media age, and the revolutions were playing out in Twitter messages and Facebook updates. It was unlike anything that officials at Langley had seen before, and historical precursors like the fall of Communism were of little help to CIA leaders as they struggled to advise the White House and State Department about which Arab dictator was likely to fall next. At one senior staff meeting, CIA director Leon Panetta pressed his aides to make sense of the blizzard of digital messages. “Isn’t anyone able to capture all of these messages in one place?” he asked, clearly puzzled by the ways of the younger generation.

  But the problem went deeper for the CIA, a spy agency that very quickly was coming to experience the downside of its reorientation toward counterterrorism. The CIA was founded in 1947 on the premise that presidents and policy makers needed advance warning about the dynamics shaping world events, but both President George W. Bush and Barack Obama had decided that hunting and killing terrorists should be the agency’s top priority. The agency didn’t have enough spies doing actual spying, not enough case officers on the ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia whose job it was to collect intelligence about ferment in the streets or about fears among foreign leaders that they might be losing their grip on power.

  The CIA had allied itself with ruthless intelligence services throughout the Middle East and North Africa, forming partnerships with foreign spy services run by the likes of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. These partnerships had helped the CIA amass scalps for the war on terror. CIA directors were on a first-name basis with Moussa Koussa, the head of Gaddafi’s brutal spy service, and American and Libyan spies had worked together to hunt down men with suspected ties to al Qaeda, capture them, and put them in Libya’s notorious Abu Salim jail. After Gaddafi fell and rebels sacked Libyan intelligence headquarters, troves of documents were found detailing the close ties between American and Libyan intelligence. There was even a letter to Moussa Koussa from Porter Goss, the former CIA director, thanking the Libyan spymaster for his Christmas gift of fresh oranges.

  Therein lay much of the problem: Libyan or Egyptian spies were hardly about to be candid with American officials about the fragility of their own governments. And they kept close watch on dissident leaders, making it difficult for CIA case officers in cities like Cairo to meet with opposition groups and collect intelligence about domestic unrest in the North African states. Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, would later admit that the agency’s decision to tie itself to authoritarian regimes in the Arab world had crippled its ability to collect political and social intelligence in those countries. As he put it, “How much do you want to push collection on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt if you’re going to alienate [Mubarak’s intelligence chief] Omar Suleiman and he stops being a good counterterrorism partner for you?”

  Government leaders from around the world hailed the end of North Africa’s calcified dictatorships. But for sleep-deprived, often neurotic officers inside the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the events of early 2011 were hardly the cause for optimism. It wasn’t just that they were watching their close foreign allies be unceremoniously pushed from power. Even more worrying was that Islamist groups that for decades had been under the heel of dictators—from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to radical groups in Libya that the CIA and Libyan intelligence had worked together to snuff out—were gaining political power. The whirlwind taking place in the Arab world could, the CTC feared, sow the seeds for a resurgence of al Qaeda and its affiliates.

  Such was the heartening prospect of al Qaeda’s leader, holed up inside the top floor of a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Furiously writing letters to his subordinates during what would be the final weeks of his life, Osama bin Laden was making a case in the early months of 2011 that the Arab revolts were the realization of a vision he first laid out in the 1990s, when he founded al Qaeda. In fact, the revolts had played out nothing like he had predicted, and the governments in Egypt and Tunisia had been toppled not by al Qaeda or by those seeking a pan-Muslim caliphate but by a youthful grassroots effort using media technology to further the revolution.

  But bin Laden still found hope in the chaos. He wrote
gleefully to one of his deputies that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had expressed worries that “the region will fall into the hands of the armed Islamists.” What the world was witnessing in “these days of consecutive revolutions,” he wrote, “is a great and glorious event” that would likely “encompass the majority of the Islamic world with the will of Allah.”

  14: THE UNRAVELING

  “It was the Americans!

  It was Blackwater!

  It was another Raymond Davis!”

  —Hafiz Muhammad Saeed

  The American spy sat for weeks inside a dark cell at Kot Lakhpat prison, on the industrial fringes of Lahore, a jail with an unsavory reputation for inmates dying under murky circumstances. He had been separated from the rest of the prisoners, held in a section of the decaying facility where the guards didn’t carry weapons, a concession for his safety that American officials had managed to extract from the prison staff. The United States consulate in Lahore had negotiated another safeguard: A small team of dogs was tasting Raymond Davis’s food, checking that it had not been laced with poison.

  For many senior Pakistani spies, the man sitting in the jail cell seemed the first solid proof of their suspicions that the CIA had built up a small army inside Pakistan, a group of trigger-happy cowboys carrying out a range of nefarious activities. For the CIA, the disclosure of Davis’s role with the agency shed an unflattering light on a post–September 11 phenomenon: how the CIA had farmed out some of its most sensitive jobs to outside contractors and others with neither the experience nor the temperament to work in the war zones of the Islamic world.