The Way of the Knife Page 28

  During a tense phone call, Mullen said that American troops had been in the compound in Abbottabad and had killed bin Laden. There was a downed American helicopter at the scene. Then Mullen raised a subject that Obama officials had been debating since bin Laden’s death had been confirmed: Should President Obama make a public announcement that night or wait until the following day? Dawn had already broken in Islamabad, and Kayani told Mullen that President Obama should make an announcement as soon as possible, if only to explain why there was a burning American military helicopter in central Pakistan. After a few more minutes, the conversation was over and the two men hung up.

  Kayani, whose position as head of the Pakistani military made him the most powerful figure in the country, was facing the most acute crisis of his long career. Within days, Pakistan’s top generals would excoriate him for allowing the United States to violate Pakistani sovereignty, but during the phone call with Mullen he had struck a conciliatory tone, because bin Laden had just been killed less than a mile from Pakistan’s premier military academy. Lashing out at Mullen that night, it seemed to Kayani, might feed America’s suspicions about Pakistan’s government harboring terrorists and lead to a permanent break between the United States and Pakistan. A proud man who had reached the pinnacle of his military career, Kayani faced an unsavory choice. He could either appear complicit in hiding Osama bin Laden or incompetent for being unable to stop the world’s most hunted man from taking refuge in the middle of his country. He chose the latter.

  —

  IN TRUTH, any fading embers of productive relations between the United States and Pakistan had largely been extinguished by the time bin Laden was killed. The Raymond Davis episode had poisoned Leon Panetta’s relationship with General Pasha, the ISI chief, and the already small number of Obama officials pushing for better relations between Washington and Islamabad dwindled even further. Ambassador Cameron Munter was reporting daily back to Washington about the negative impact of the armed-drone campaign, and Admiral Mullen generally agreed with Munter that the CIA seemed to be conducting a war in a vacuum, oblivious to the ramifications that the drone strikes were having on America’s relations with Pakistan’s government.

  The CIA had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when CIA targeters weren’t certain about exactly who it was they were killing. Under the rules of so-called signature strikes, decisions about whether to fire missiles from drones could be made based on patterns of activity deemed suspicious. The bar for lethal action had again been lowered.

  For instance, if a group of young “military-aged males” were observed moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp and were thought to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate targets. American officials admit it is somewhat difficult to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas a “military-aged male” could be as young as fifteen or sixteen. Using such broad definitions to determine who was a “combatant” and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials to claim that the drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians. It was something of a trick of logic: In an area of known militant activity, all military-aged males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant, unless there was explicit intelligence that posthumously proved him to be innocent.

  The perils of this approach were laid bare on March 17, 2011, just two days after Raymond Davis was released from prison under the “blood money” arrangement and spirited out of the country. CIA drones attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, killing dozens of men. Ambassador Munter and some at the Pentagon thought the timing of the strike was disastrous, and some American officials suspected that the massive strike was the CIA venting its anger about the Davis episode. Munter thought that General Pasha, the ISI chief, had gone out on a limb to help end the Raymond Davis affair and that the Datta Khel strike could be perceived as a deliberate thumb in the eye. More important, however, many American officials believed that the strike had been botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.

  Other American officials came to the CIA’s defense, saying that the tribal meeting was in fact a meeting of senior militants, and therefore a legitimate target. But the drone strike unleashed a furious response in Pakistan. General Kayani issued a rare public statement, saying the operation was carried out “with complete disregard to human life,” and street protests in Lahore, Karachi, and Peshawar forced the temporary closure of American consulates in those cities.

  Munter wasn’t opposed to the drone program, but he believed that the CIA was being reckless and that his position as ambassador was becoming untenable. His relationship with the CIA station chief in Islamabad, already strained because of their disagreements over the handling of the Raymond Davis case, deteriorated even further when Munter demanded that the CIA notify him before each missile strike and give him the chance to call off the operation. During one screaming match between the two men, Munter tried to make sure the station chief knew who was in charge, only to be reminded of who really held the power in Pakistan.

  “You’re not the ambassador!” Munter shouted.

  “You’re right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the CIA station chief replied.

  This turf battle spread to Washington, and a month after bin Laden was killed President Obama’s top advisers were openly fighting in a National Security Council meeting over who really was in charge in Pakistan. At the June 2011 meeting, Munter, who participated via secure video link, began making his case that he should have veto power over specific drone strikes. Using soccer terminology, he said he should get a “red card” to scuttle proposed strikes.

  Leon Panetta cut Munter off midsentence, telling him that the CIA had the authority to do what it wanted in Pakistan. It didn’t need to get the ambassador’s approval for anything.

  “I don’t work for you,” Panetta told Munter, according to several people who attended the meeting.

  But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to Munter’s defense. She turned to Panetta and told him that he was wrong to assume he could steamroll the ambassador and launch strikes against his approval.

  “No, Hillary,” Panetta said, “it’s you who are flat wrong.”

  There was a stunned silence, and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon tried to regain control of the meeting by quieting the squabbling aides. In the weeks that followed the meeting, Donilon brokered a compromise of sorts: Munter would be allowed to object to specific drone strikes, but the CIA could still press its case to the White House and get approval for strikes even over the ambassador’s objections. The ambassador was given, at best, a “yellow card.” Obama’s CIA had won another battle.

  In the months that followed, Munter increasingly found himself isolated. Even Admiral Mullen, once the administration’s most prominent advocate of maintaining at least barely functional relations with Islamabad, began to take a darker view toward Pakistan after the bin Laden raid. Not only did Mullen have his suspicions that someone senior in the Pakistani military or ISI may have been hiding Osama bin Laden; he had also become aware of an astonishing piece of intelligence. American spies had telephone intercepts that seemed to prove that the killing of Syed Saleem Shahzad, a Pakistani journalist who had been investigating links between the ISI and Pakistani militant groups, had been ordered by Pakistani spies. Shahzad had been beaten to death and tossed into an irrigation canal eighty miles south of Islamabad. According to classified assessments by American spy agencies, the killing had been an order from the highest ranks of the ISI, from General Ahmad Shuja Pasha himself.

  Not long afterward, a separate intelligence tip warned that two suspicious fertilizer trucks were navigating the NATO supply routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The tip was vague and warned only that the trucks might be used as bombs and driven into Afghanistan f
or an attack against an American base. U.S. military officials in Afghanistan called General Kayani in Pakistan to alert him, and Kayani promised that the trucks would be stopped before they reached the Afghan border.

  But the Pakistanis did not act. The trucks sat in North Waziristan for two months, as operatives from the Haqqani Network turned them into suicide bombs powerful enough to kill hundreds of people. American intelligence about the location of the trucks remained murky, but Admiral Mullen was certain that, given the ISI’s history of contacts with the Haqqanis, Pakistani spies would be able to put a stop to any attack. By September 9, 2011, the trucks were moving toward Afghanistan, and the top American commander in the region, General John Allen, urged General Kayani to stop the trucks during a trip to Islamabad. Kayani told Allen he would “make a phone call” to prevent any imminent assault, an offer that raised eyebrows because it seemed to indicate a particularly close relationship between the Haqqanis and Pakistan’s security apparatus.

  Then, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, one of the trucks pulled up next to the outer wall of a U.S. military base in Wardak Province, in eastern Afghanistan. The driver detonated the explosives inside the vehicle and the blast ripped open the wall to the base. The explosion wounded more than seventy American Marines inside the base, and spiraling shrapnel killed an eight-year-old Afghan girl standing half a mile away.

  The attack infuriated Mullen and convinced him that General Kayani had no sincere interest in curbing his military’s ties to militant groups like the Haqqanis. Other top American officials had been convinced of this years earlier, but Mullen had believed that Kayani was a different breed of Pakistani general, a man who saw the ISI’s ties to the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba as nothing more than a suicide pact. But the Wardak bombing was, for Mullen, proof that Pakistan was playing a crooked and deadly game.

  Days after the bombing—and immediately after the Haqqani Network launched another brazen attack, this time on the American-embassy compound in Kabul—Admiral Mullen went to Capitol Hill to give his final congressional testimony as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He came to deliver a blunt message, one that State Department officials had been unsuccessful in trying to soften in the hours before he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  Pakistani spies were directing the insurgency inside of Afghanistan, Mullen told the congressional panel, and had blood on their hands from the deaths of American troops and Afghan civilians. “The Haqqani Network,” Mullen said, “acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.”

  Even after a tumultuous decade of American relations with Pakistan, no top American official up to that point had made such a direct accusation in public. The statement carried even more power because it came from Admiral Michael Mullen, whom Pakistani officials considered to be one of their few remaining allies in Washington. The generals in Pakistan were stung by Mullen’s comments, no one more than his old friend General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

  The relationship was dead; the two men didn’t speak again after Mullen’s testimony. Each man felt he had been betrayed by the other.

  —

  DAYS AFTER Osama bin Laden was killed, Dr. Shakil Afridi received an urgent call from Sue, his CIA handler. The fallout from the American operation was still roiling Pakistan, and Afridi had not heard from anyone in the CIA since the Navy SEALs stormed the house in Abbottabad. As the details of the operation began trickling out, Afridi finally understood why he had been in Abbottabad, why the CIA had asked him to focus his work on Bilal Town, and why there had been so much interest in the house on Pathan Street. Sue told Afridi to come immediately to Islamabad—and meet her at one of their regular rendezvous spots.

  It’s not safe for you to stay in Pakistan, she told the doctor when they met. The ISI was already hunting for anyone who might have helped the Americans find bin Laden, and it was just a matter of time before his work for the CIA was discovered. She told him to get on a bus and head west, across the border into Afghanistan. She handed him a telephone number and told him to call the number once he reached the bus station in Kabul. From there, he would receive further instructions.

  He never went. Afridi assumed that since the CIA had never told him that he was involved in the bin Laden hunt, he would be safe in his own country and not be caught up in the dragnet that Pakistani security services had set up after the Abbottabad raid. It was a gross miscalculation. By the end of May, Dr. Afridi had been arrested by the ISI and imprisoned.

  After years of tumult between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, after the double dealing by both sides, and after the recriminations when a CIA contractor killed two people in Lahore and drew back the curtain on the new front of America’s secret war in Pakistan, the case of Dr. Shakil Afridi showed just how far things had plummeted for the United States and Pakistan. The ISI had arrested a key CIA source, a man who played a role in the effort to track down the world’s most wanted terrorist, and put him in a jail cell in Peshawar.

  Of course, no country looks kindly upon one of its citizens when he is caught working for a foreign spy service. But, bizarrely, Afridi was not charged with treason or espionage, nor was he even charged under Pakistani law. Instead, he found himself in a court in Peshawar for violating the obscure British-era Frontier Crimes Regulations that govern Pakistan’s tribal areas. Afridi had joined a “conspiracy to wage war against the state,” the court found, because of his ties to Lashkar-e-Islam, the militant group run by the bus driver–cum–drug lord who had kidnapped him in 2008. Because Afridi had given medical treatment to Bagh’s fighters, and because of what the court described as “his love for Mangal Bagh,” Dr. Afridi was sentenced to thirty-three years in prison.

  When the sentence was handed down, Lashkar-e-Islam issued a public statement vehemently denying any ties with “such a shameless man.”

  Afridi was no friend of the group, the statement said, because of his history of overcharging his patients.

  16: FIRE FROM THE SKY

  “Everything is backwards.”

  —W. George Jameson

  One morning in late summer 2011, days before he took over as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, General David Petraeus paid a visit to Michael Hayden, the Bush administration’s third and final CIA director. The two men had ascended the ranks of the military during the same era but had chosen very different paths and had never been particularly close. Hayden had been a military-intelligence specialist and ran the ultrasecret National Security Agency in the years before he took over at Langley. Petraeus had spent a career in combat units, running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and leading U.S. Central Command. He had emerged as one of American history’s most lauded generals.

  The men shared a cordial breakfast at Hayden’s house, and Hayden offered advice to Petraeus about managing the tribal dynamics at Langley. As Hayden had learned, the case officers and analysts could be devoted yet prickly, didn’t salute smartly, and sometimes had little tolerance for the chain of command. Midway through breakfast the discussion turned serious, and Hayden offered a warning to Petraeus.

  The CIA had changed, perhaps permanently, he said, and there was a real danger that the spy agency could turn into no more than a smaller, more secretive version of the Pentagon.

  “Never before has the CIA looked more like the OSS,” Hayden said, referring to William Donovan’s band of cloak-and-dagger men. After a decade of secret war, Hayden said, man hunting and targeted-killing operations were consuming the CIA, and if that continued, the agency might one day be incapable of carrying out what was supposed to be its primary mission: spying.

  “The CIA is not the OSS,” Hayden continued. “It’s the nation’s global intelligence service. And you’ve got to discipline yourself to carve out time to do something else besides counterterrorism.”

  Hayden, of course, had done
more than his part to accelerate this transformation. A spy agency that on September 11, 2001, had been decried as bumbling and risk-averse had, under the watchful eye of four successive CIA directors, gone on a killing spree. During the long, hot summer in Pakistan in the months after Osama bin Laden’s death, the CIA killed a string of al Qaeda operatives, including Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who had been bin Laden’s tether to the outside world during his time in hiding in Abbottabad. Some in Washington likened President Obama to Michael Corleone during the final minutes of The Godfather, coolly ordering lieutenants to dispatch his enemies in a calculated burst of violence.

  Thirty-five years earlier, after the toxic details about the CIA’s efforts to kill foreign leaders seeped into public view, President Gerald Ford ordered a ban on assassinations that he hoped would prevent future presidents from being too easily seduced by black operations. But in the decade since the September 11 attacks, legions of U.S. government lawyers had written detailed opinions about why the targeted-killing operations carried out by the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command far from declared war zones didn’t violate President Ford’s assassination ban. Just as lawyers for President Bush had redefined torture to permit extreme interrogations by the CIA and the military, so had lawyers for President Obama given America’s secret agencies latitude to carry out extensive killing operations.

  One of them was Harold Koh, who had come to Washington from Yale Law School, where he had been the school’s dean. He had been a fierce critic from the left of the Bush administration’s war on terror and had decried the CIA’s interrogation methods—including waterboarding—as illegal torture. But when he joined the government as the State Department’s top lawyer, he found himself spending hours poring over volumes of secret intelligence in order to pass judgment over whether men should live or die. In speeches, he offered a muscular defense of the Obama administration’s targeted-killing operations, saying that in a time of war the American government was under no obligation to give suspects normal due process before putting them on a kill list.