The Way of the Knife Read online

  Still, in moments of public reflection, he spoke of the psychological burdens of spending so much time reading the biographies of the young men the United States was debating whether or not to kill. “As the dean of Yale Law School I spent many, many hours looking at the résumés of young twenty-year-olds, students in their twenties, trying to figure out which ones should be admitted,” he said during one speech. “I now spend a comparable amount of time studying the résumés of terrorists, same age. Reading about how they were recruited. Their first mission. Their second mission. Often I know their background as intimately as I knew my students’.”

  In the midst of the surge of drone attacks, President Obama ordered a reshuffling of his national-security team. The result was something of a grace note at the end of a decade during which the work of soldiers and spies had become largely indistinguishable. Leon Panetta, who as CIA director had made the spy agency more like the military, was taking over the Pentagon. General Petraeus, the four-star general who had signed secret orders in 2009 to expand military spying operations throughout the Middle East, would run the CIA.

  In his fourteen months at Langley, before ignominiously resigning over an extramarital affair with his biographer, Petraeus accelerated the trends that Hayden had warned him about. He pushed the White House for money to expand the CIA’s drone fleet, and he told members of Congress that, under his watch, the CIA was carrying out more covert-action operations than at any point in its history. Within weeks of arriving at Langley, Petraeus even ordered an operation that, up to that point, no CIA director had ever done before: the targeted killing of an American citizen.

  —

  BY THE TIME PETRAEUS took over the CIA, an owlish, bespectacled preacher with a bushy black beard and a message of rage had ascended to the top of America’s kill list, the list coordinated in the basement office of John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser. With bin Laden dead and the punishing campaign of drone strikes thinning al Qaeda’s ranks in Pakistan, counterterrorism officials in Washington began to devote more attention to the threat from Yemen and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That meant hunting down and killing Anwar al-Awlaki.

  Al-Awlaki had taken a strange path to being designated as an enemy of the United States. Born in New Mexico in 1971, he spent his early years in the United States while his father, Nasser al-Awlaki, a prominent Yemeni who would go on to serve as President Saleh’s minister of agriculture, studied agricultural economics at New Mexico State University. Nasser moved the family back to Yemen seven years later, where Anwar lived until returning to the United States for college in the early 1990s.

  At Colorado State University, Anwar won the presidency of the school’s Muslim Student Association but was not comfortable with the rigidly conservative strand of Islam—with its prohibitions on sex and alcohol—that some of his fellow students practiced. He stayed in Colorado after graduation, and to his father’s chagrin he began preaching at a mosque in Fort Collins. Nasser had wanted his son to enter a more lucrative profession, but within a few years Anwar had moved to San Diego to take a position as an imam at a mosque at the edge of the city.

  His views gradually grew more conservative, and he preached about living a life of purity. But in his private life he sometimes strayed from his own teachings; he was picked up multiple times by the San Diego police for soliciting prostitutes. More significantly, in 1999 the FBI began investigating al-Awlaki’s ties to militant suspects in the San Diego area, suspicions that rose partly from his work for a small Islamic charity. He would even come into contact with two future September 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who both prayed at his mosque and attended conferences with the cleric.

  But the FBI inquiries into his work unearthed no criminal activity, and by the time of the September 11 attacks al-Awlaki had resettled in Northern Virginia, where he was preaching at a large mosque in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He infused his sermons with references to pop culture and American history, and he soon got his first taste of media stardom when he began getting calls from reporters to help explain the basics of Islam to American newspaper readers. He was even considered something of a voice of moderation—participating in an online chat for The Washington Post about Ramadan and attending a Pentagon prayer breakfast. “We came here to build, not to destroy,” he said during one sermon, calling himself and other imams in America “the bridge between Americans and one billion Muslims worldwide.”

  But his message would soon turn darker. After a police crackdown on Muslim charities and other Muslim-owned institutions in 2002, al-Awlaki lashed out publicly about how the Bush administration’s war against terrorism had become a war against Muslims. Shortly afterward, he moved to London, where he enthralled young Muslims who attended his fiery sermons and those who listened to his lectures on CD recordings, which he sold in a boxed set. But even as his fame grew, he had trouble supporting himself in the United Kingdom, and in 2004, he returned to Yemen, where he used Internet chat rooms and eventually YouTube to transmit his sermons globally.

  The fact that his sermons were delivered in English limited his influence in the Muslim world, but his virulent anti-American rhetoric spurred a sliver of his followers to action. One of them was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the young Nigerian student who would try to set off a bomb hidden in his underwear while on an airplane descending into Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Months before, Abdulmutallab had written an essay about his reasons for wanting to wage jihad and sent it to al-Awlaki. As American investigators began piecing together the failed Christmas Day plot, they began to get a better understanding of the role al-Awlaki played within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The thirty-eight-year-old American man who had once spoken about being America’s “bridge” to the Muslim world was not merely an inspirational prophet for the digital age, a peddler of Internet hatred; he had put deeds to words and had begun helping the terror group plot a wave of terror against the United States.

  John Brennan, who maintained close ties to Saudi intelligence officials and had already been running much of America’s clandestine war in Yemen from the White House, believed that it was al-Awlaki who was principally responsible for a shift in the al Qaeda affiliate’s strategy. While the group had long thought globally, it had acted locally by focusing its attacks on targets inside Saudi Arabia. But when bin Laden and his followers in Pakistan were under siege, AQAP saw the opportunity to pick up the mantle as America’s chief tormenter. Brennan believed that al-Awlaki was pushing the group increasingly in this direction.

  This may or may not have been the case, but inside the National Security Council, officials began debating an extraordinary matter: whether to authorize the secret killing of al-Awlaki, an American citizen, without capturing him or bringing him to trial. Harold Koh and other government lawyers began studying the raw intelligence about al-Awlaki’s role inside the Yemeni militant group, and within months of Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to blow up the jetliner, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had produced a classified memo giving the Obama administration approval to kill the renegade American cleric. Because al-Awlaki had a senior position inside al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and had declared war on the United States, the memo argued, he no longer had a Constitutional right to due process.

  And yet the United States hadn’t a clue where al-Awlaki or any other top AQAP operatives were hiding. Joint Special Operations Command had just begun ramping up its efforts to collect intelligence in Yemen, and the Obama administration was almost entirely dependent on the spies that Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service had planted around the country. And after the botched American strike in May 2010 that accidently killed a deputy governor in Yemen, Saleh had put even more restrictions on American activities there, and the clandestine war had ground to a halt.

  —

  SLOWLY, HOWEVER, THE STRONGMAN in Yemen began to lose his grip. President Saleh had maintained power for decades
by expertly manipulating the various factions inside the country, often pitting them against each other in a fashion that one Bush administration official had likened to “dancing in the snake pit.” But by early 2011, Yemen had become caught up in the street revolts spreading across the Arab world, and a government that once could barely control territory beyond the capital now couldn’t even keep order there. Then, during an attack on the presidential palace in June, a barrage of rockets struck the room where President Saleh was hiding and knocked him to the floor. He suffered from internal bleeding in his skull, and the fires from the attack burned 40 percent of his body. Saleh’s bodyguards put the wounded leader on an emergency flight to Saudi Arabia, where he spent hours in surgery. He survived, but his days as president were over. Ali Abdullah Saleh was no longer around to dictate what the United States could and could not do in his country.

  The CIA and JSOC had used the yearlong pause in the American air war in Yemen after Deputy Governor Jaber al-Shabwani’s death to build up a network of human spies and a web of electronic eavesdropping around Yemen. At the National Security Agency, at Fort Meade, Maryland, more analysts were assigned to monitor cell phones in Yemen and to penetrate computer networks in the hope of intercepting e-mail traffic. And, very quietly, the CIA began to build a drone base in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia to serve as a hub for the al Qaeda hunt in Yemen. Saudi Arabia had given permission to the CIA to build the base on the condition that the kingdom’s role be masked. Said one American official involved in the decision to build the base, “The Saudis didn’t want their face on the operation.”

  Until the CIA base was ready, Yemen was still JSOC’s war. In May 2011, the Pentagon began sending armed drones over Yemen, flown from Ethiopia and Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti, the hardscrabble former French Foreign Legion base where a small group of American Marines and special-operations troops had operated since 2002. The buzzing of the drones became a regular sound in some of Yemen’s most remote expanses of desert, and a cat-and-mouse game between the jihadis and the killer machines began.

  One Yemeni journalist, after spending two weeks with AQAP leaders, described the security procedures the group enacted to avoid being hit from the air. If a Yemeni jet fighter was approaching, they remained in place because, as the militants told the reporter, “The Yemeni planes always miss their targets.” But if an American drone began buzzing overhead, they did the opposite. They shut off their cell phones, hopped into trucks, and began moving, because the drones “can’t bomb moving targets.” The militants had figured out one of the weaknesses of the drones, a problem created by flying the planes by satellite. Because drone pilots were separated from their airplanes by thousands of miles, what the pilots saw on their screens in the United States was sometimes several seconds behind what the drone was watching. The problem, known as latency, had for years made it difficult for targeting officers at the CIA and the Pentagon to figure out where to aim the missile fired from the drone, which explains some of the civilian casualties and missed targets of the drone wars.

  Being in a moving truck allowed al-Awlaki to narrowly escape death in May 2011, just days after the commando raid in Pakistan that killed bin Laden. A human source spying for the Americans provided information that al-Awlaki was riding in a truck in Shabwa province, and the JSOC team sent drones and Marine Harrier jets to the area. But the first American missile missed al-Awlaki’s truck, and when clouds moved into the area and obscured the view of the planes, al-Awlaki was able to jump into another truck and drive in the opposite direction. The American planes continued to follow the first truck, and a missile strike killed two local al Qaeda operatives in the vehicle. Al-Awlaki took refuge in a cave. According to Yemen scholar Gregory Johnsen, al-Awlaki later told his friends that the incident “increased my certainty that no human being will die until they complete their livelihood and appointed time.”

  At the White House, President Obama and John Brennan were growing frustrated that JSOC kept missing al-Awlaki and other top leaders. A year and a half since Obama had expanded American clandestine activities in Yemen, no senior AQAP leaders had been killed and a number of strikes had been carried out with faulty intelligence. More civilians had been killed than militant leaders. Flying armed drones over Yemen was an improvement over cruise missiles, but Djibouti’s government would not allow the United States to launch any lethal missions from Camp Lemonnier without first getting its approval. JSOC leaders bristled at the restrictions.

  The CIA operated under no similar restrictions, and by September 2011 the drone base that the spy agency had built in the Saudi desert was completed and ready for use. David Petraeus, who by now was CIA director, ordered some of the agency’s fleet of Predator and Reaper aircraft from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia. Spy agencies also repositioned satellites and reconfigured data networks to allow the drones to communicate with pilots back in the United States, and they carried out the other technological work required to open a new front in the drone war.

  And the CIA had something beyond drone aircraft parked close to Yemen’s border: a source within al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who began providing regular information about al-Awlaki’s movements. The CIA had already collected intelligence about AQAP’s structure, and had managed to get an early warning about the group’s glossy Internet publication, Inspire, each time before it was published. AQAP had used the magazine, written in English, to raise its profile and to incite would-be jihadis in the United States or the United Kingdom to wage war close to home. Major Nidal Hassan—an Army psychiatrist who killed thirteen people in a crowded military facility at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009—was a reader of Inspire. So was Faisal Shahzad, a junior financial analyst living in Connecticut who seven months later tried to detonate a van full of explosives in the middle of Times Square. One Inspire article, written by the magazine’s Pakistani-American publisher, Samir Khan, carried the title “Making a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

  Each time they learned about an upcoming issue of Inspire, Obama officials debated whether to sabotage the magazine before it went online or insert messages into the text that might embarrass AQAP and set off alarms inside the group that a Saudi or American mole might have penetrated its ranks. But they decided against it, in part because they worried that anyone suspected of helping them might be executed. But there was a second reason. Since Inspire could be read online in the United States, any efforts by the CIA to manipulate its content might violate laws prohibiting the agency from carrying out propaganda operations against Americans. These same concerns had led the CIA to mostly abandon its propaganda operations since the advent of the Internet, when Americans sitting in front of laptop computers could read news and information that had been written thousands of miles away. The vacuum had allowed the Pentagon, and people like Michael Furlong, to fill the void with a new kind of information warfare tailored for the digital age.

  Impressed by the CIA’s record of targeted killings in Pakistan, White House officials took the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki away from the Pentagon and gave it to the CIA. On September 30, a fleet of American drones took off from the base in Saudi Arabia, crossed into Yemen, and began tracking a group of men riding in a convoy across al Jawf province, an expanse of desert near the Saudi border once renowned for breeding Arabian horses. The men had stopped to eat breakfast when, according to witnesses, they spotted the drones and rushed back to their cars. But the drones had locked onto their target, and what followed was a carefully orchestrated symphony of destruction. Two Predator drones pointed lasers on the cars, a tactic that improved the accuracy of the missile strikes, and a Reaper drone fired missiles that delivered a direct hit. Every man riding in the convoy was killed, including American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, a diabolical propagandist and the creative force behind Inspire.

  —

  ABDULRAHMAN AL-AWLAKI—the imam’s skinny sixteen-year-old Denver-born son—had slipped out of the kitchen window in his family’s house in Sana’a two weeks
earlier. It was the only home he had known since he moved to Yemen as a young boy, after his father had become famous in the United States and the United Kingdom for his inflammatory sermons. In the years since, his father became the Obama administration’s most hunted man and fled Sana’a for the relative security of Yemen’s remote provinces, but Abdulrahman mostly lived the life of a normal adolescent. He entered high school with an interest in sports and music, and he kept his Facebook page regularly updated.

  In the middle of September 2011, he decided he needed to find his father, wherever he was hiding. Before sneaking out of the house, he left a note for his relatives:

  “I am sorry for leaving,” he wrote, “I’m going to find my father.”

  He went to Shabwa province, the region of Yemen where Anwar al-Awlaki was thought to be hiding and where American jets and drones had narrowly missed him the previous May. What Abdulrahman did not know was that his father had already fled Shabwa for al Jawf. He wandered about, having little idea about what to do next. Then, he heard the news about the missile strike that had killed his father, and he called his family back in Sana’a. He told them he was coming home.

  He didn’t return to Sana’a immediately. On October 14, two weeks after CIA drones killed his father, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was sitting with friends at an open-air restaurant near Azzan, a town in Shabwa province. From a distance, faint at first, came the familiar buzzing sound. Then, missiles tore through the air and hit the restaurant. Within seconds, nearly a dozen dead bodies were strewn in the dirt. One of them was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Hours after the news of his death was reported, the teenager’s Facebook page was turned into a memorial.