The Way of the Knife Read online

  American officials have never discussed the operation publicly, but they acknowledge in private that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by mistake. The teenager had not been on any target list. The intended target of the drone strike was Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian leader of AQAP. American officials had gotten information that al-Banna was eating at the restaurant at the time of the strike, but the intelligence turned out to be wrong. Al-Banna was nowhere near the location of the missile strike. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Although the strike remains classified, several American officials said that the drones that killed the boy were not, like those that killed his father, operated by the CIA. Instead, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a victim of the parallel drone program run by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which had continued even after the CIA joined the manhunt in Yemen. The CIA and the Pentagon had converged on the killing grounds of one of the world’s poorest and most desolate countries, running two distinct drone wars. The CIA maintained one target list, and JSOC kept another. Both were in Yemen carrying out nearly the exact same mission. Ten years after Donald Rumsfeld first tried to wrest control of the new war from American spies, the Pentaton and CIA were conducting the same secret missions at the ends of the earth.

  Two months after his son and grandson were killed, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki mourned their deaths in a video eulogy he posted on YouTube. Dr. al-Awlaki spoke for nearly seven minutes in clear, deliberate English. Loyal Muslims must keep his son Anwar’s message alive, he said, and spread it to all those who had not yet been touched by his words. He pledged, ominously and without further detail, that his son’s “blood did not and will not go in vain.”

  Dr. al-Awlaki described America as a “state gone mad,” enthralled with a strategy of assassinations in the darkest corners of the world. The attacks had become so routine, he said, that the strikes that killed his son and grandson went almost unnoticed inside the United States. This was partly right. On the day Anwar al-Awlaki was killed, President Obama made brief mention of his death during a speech, calling it “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.” But by the next day, the killing of the firebrand preacher—an American citizen whose death had been authorized by a secret Justice Department memo—received no mention on network nightly news broadcasts. Two weeks later, barely any attention was paid to the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the skinny American teenager.

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  THE DRONE STRIKES REMAINED a secret, at least officially. The Obama administration has gone to court to fend off challenges over the release of documents related to CIA and JSOC drones and the secret legal opinions buttressing the operations. In late September 2012, a panel of three judges sat in front of a wall of green marble in a federal courtroom in Washington and listened to oral arguments in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union demanding that the CIA hand over documents about the targeted-killing program. A lawyer representing the CIA refused to acknowledge that the CIA had anything to do with drones, even under cross-examination from skeptical judges who questioned him about public statements by former CIA director Leon Panetta. In one case, Panetta had joked to a group of American troops stationed in Naples, Italy, that, although as secretary of defense he had “a helluva lot more weapons available . . . than . . . at CIA,” the “Predators [weren’t] that bad.”

  At one point in the court proceeding, an exasperated Judge Merrick Garland pointed out the absurdity of the CIA’s position, in light of the fact that both President Obama and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan had spoken publicly about drones. “If the CIA is the emperor,” he told the CIA’s lawyer, “you’re asking us to say that the emperor has clothes even when the emperor’s bosses say he doesn’t.”

  But for all the secrecy, drone warfare has been institutionalized, ensuring that the missions of the CIA and the Pentagon continue to bleed together as the two organizations fight for more resources to wage secret war. Sometimes, as in Yemen, the two agencies run parallel and competing drone operations. Other times, they carve up the world and each take charge of different parts of the remote-controlled war—the CIA in Pakistan, for instance, and the Pentagon running the drone war in Libya.

  It was July 2004 when the 9/11 Commission concluded that the CIA should give up its paramilitary functions. It made little sense, the commission concluded, for the CIA and the Pentagon to both be in the business of waging clandestine wars. “Whether the price is measured in either money or people,” the commission’s final report stated, “the United States cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret military operations, secretly operating standoff missiles, and secretly training foreign military or paramilitary forces.”

  The Bush administration rejected this recommendation, and in the years since, the United States has moved in the exact opposite direction. The CIA and the Pentagon now each jealously guard different parts of the shadow war’s architecture—a drone base in Saudi Arabia, a former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, and other remote outposts—and are loath to relinquish any control as politicians embrace targeted-killing operations as the future of American warfare. Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues its push into human spying. The Defense Intelligence Agency is hoping to build a new cadre of undercover spies, hundreds of them, for spying missions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. “Everything is backwards,” said W. George Jameson, a lawyer who spent thirty-three years at the CIA. “You’ve got an intelligence agency fighting a war and a military organization trying to gather on-the-ground intelligence.”

  Throughout the grueling presidential election season of 2012, President Obama frequently alluded to targeted killings as a sign of his toughness, speaking with braggadocio reminiscent of President Bush during the early days after the September 11 attacks. Once, a reporter asked him about accusations made by Republican presidential candidates that his foreign policy amounted to a strategy of appeasement. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the twenty-two out of thirty al Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” Obama shot back. “Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.”

  For all their policy differences during the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama and Governor Mitt Romney found nothing to disagree about when it came to targeted killings, and Romney said that if elected president he would continue the campaign of drone strikes that Obama had escalated. Fearing such a prospect, Obama officials raced during the final weeks before the election to implement clear rules in the event they were no longer holding the levers in the drone wars. The effort to codify the procedures of targeted killings revealed just how much the secret operations remained something of an ad hoc effort. Fundamental questions about who can be killed, where they can be killed, and when they can be killed still had not been answered. The pressure to answer those questions eased on November 6, 2012, when a decisive election ensured that President Obama would remain in office for another four years. The effort to bring clarity to the secret wars flagged.

  A nation fatigued by the long, bloody, and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed, by the end of President Obama’s first term, little concerned about the government’s escalation of clandestine warfare. Quite the contrary. According to one poll conducted for Amy Zegart, of Stanford University, the country had, to a remarkable degree, become increasingly hawkish on counterterrorism matters. A large majority—69 percent of respondents—said they supported the American government secretly assassinating terrorists.

  Targeted killings have made the CIA the indispensable agency for the Obama administration and have even improved the agency’s image on other matters. According to the same poll, 69 percent of respondents expressed confidence that American spy agencies had accurate information about what was happening inside Iran and North Korea. This was more than 20 points higher than a similar poll had found in 2005, when the CIA was being slammed for the botched assessments about Iraq�
�s weapons programs. Interestingly, the 2012 poll was conducted just months after North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died—and CIA officials hadn’t learned of his death until it was announced several days later on North Korean television.

  But gradually, the risks and opportunity costs of a muscle-bound CIA are becoming evident. After the CIA was surprised during the first weeks of the Arab Spring, the agency reassigned dozens of case officers and analysts to study what was happening in the Middle East and North Africa. And once again, the Obama administration also turned to CIA officers to play the role of soldiers rather than spies. As the revolution in Libya escalated into open civil war, the CIA sent paramilitary officers and private contractors to the country to establish contact with rebel groups and help ensure that the tons of machine guns and antiaircraft weapons flowing into Libya were channeled to the right rebel leaders. President Obama insisted that no American ground troops be used in the war to drive Gaddafi from power, relying instead on the formula that his administration had come to trust: drones, clandestine officers, and a cadre of contractors that had been empowered to use the Libyan rebels as a proxy army.

  But the CIA had precious little real intelligence about the rebel groups, and some of the rebels that the United States had empowered in Libya turned against their patrons.

  Just after 10 P.M. on the evening of September 11, 2012, a small CIA base in Libya received a frantic call from the American diplomatic compound just a mile away, in a different part of Benghazi, the port city on the Mediterranean Sea in eastern Libya where the American government had established a beachhead after Muammar Gaddafi’s fall. The diplomatic compound was coming under fire, the State Department officer at the other end of the line said, and attackers carrying AK-47s were beginning to stream through the facility’s main gate. Already the mob had taken gasoline cans and set one of the buildings on the compound ablaze.

  The operatives at the CIA base, who had come to Benghazi to try to prevent Gaddafi’s arsenal of shoulder-fired missiles from getting into the hands of the militant groups that had splintered off from the rebels now in charge in Libya, gathered their weapons and drove in a two-car convoy to the diplomatic compound. They had failed to convince a group of Libyan militia fighters to join them in the rescue effort, and when they arrived at the compound a fire was raging. J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, was trapped inside one of the buildings. The building’s ceiling had collapsed, and the CIA team was unable to reach Stevens, who suffocated from the intense smoke. Circling overhead, a military drone that had been diverted from a separate mission was beaming video of the firefight into the headquarters of U.S. Africa Command in Germany. But the Predator was unarmed and incapable of providing any help to the badly outnumbered team of Americans.

  Unable to hold their positions any longer, the CIA operatives and State Department security officers evacuated the diplomatic compound and drove to the CIA base a mile away. But not long after they arrived, the CIA base came under a barrage of fire from AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. It wasn’t until 5 A.M. when a group of American reinforcements arrived from Tripoli and joined the CIA operatives on the roof of the base. By then the attackers were preparing to stage another assault, and mortar shells began exploding on the roof. CIA operatives Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, both former Navy SEALs, were killed. By dawn the Americans had evacuated the CIA base and were driving to the airport, the Predator keeping watch over the convoy from the sky. All American personnel, together with the bodies of the four people killed during the assault, were flown to Tripoli. U.S. operations in Benghazi, which had been the CIA’s primary base for gathering intelligence in Libya, were shut down.

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  THE ATTACK HAD, quite literally, blinded the CIA inside Libya. And, with the agency’s decade-long pivot toward paramilitary operations, there is concern among the ranks of both current and former spies that the agency might be blind in too many other places as well, for a different reason. The CIA’s closed society has fundamentally changed, and a generation of CIA officers is now socialized in war. Just as a generation earlier Ross Newland and his training class had been told that the spy agency should eschew killing at all costs, many CIA officers who joined the agency since September 11, 2001, have experienced only man hunting and killing. This new generation has felt more of the adrenaline rush of being at the front lines than the patient, “gentle” work of intelligence gathering and espionage. The latter can be tedious, even boring, and as one former top CIA officer put it, “How are you going to keep these people on the farm now that they’ve seen the bright lights of the city?”

  Some senior CIA officials speak with pride about how the drone strikes in Pakistan have decimated al Qaeda, forcing the dwindling band of Osama bin Laden’s followers to find new places to hide—in Yemen or North Africa or Somalia or some other ungoverned part of the world. Many believe that the drone program is the most effective covert-action program in CIA history.

  But in the killing years since 2001, some of those who were present at the creation of the CIA’s drone program—and who cheered the lethal authorities the spy agency was handed after the September 11 attacks—had become deeply ambivalent. Ross Newland still praises a weapon that allows the United States to wage war without carpet-bombing enemy territories or indiscriminately lobbing artillery shells into remote villages in Pakistan, but he thinks that the CIA should have given up Predators and Reapers years ago. The allure of killing people by remote control, he said, is like “catnip,” and drones have made the CIA the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be the spy agency’s job to nurture relationships for the purpose of gathering intelligence. The Predator, Newland said, “ends up hurting the CIA. This just is not an intelligence mission.”

  Richard Blee played an even more critical role at the dawn of the drone age. As head of the CIA’s Alec Station, the unit inside the Counterterrorist Center with the specific mission of finding Osama bin Laden, Blee was among a small group of counterterrorism zealots who chafed at the restrictions placed on the spy agency in the years before the September 11 attacks. Together with his boss, J. Cofer Black, Blee pushed for the CIA to be given lethal authority to kill bin Laden and his minions. During the summer of 2001, he stood in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, watching as missiles fired from a Predator destroyed a mockup of bin Laden’s Tarnak Farms training camp. Weeks later he watched in agony as thousands died on September 11, wondering whether he and his colleagues could have pushed harder to prevent the attacks. On his desk, he still keeps a piece of rubble from the destroyed replica of Tarnak Farms.

  He has left the CIA, and in the years since his retirement he has been burdened by doubts about the wisdom of the CIA’s targeted-killing mission. As the bar for carrying out lethal action lowered, and the agency was given permission to launch missiles in Pakistan when American spies weren’t even certain whom they were killing—so-called signature strikes—he grew dismayed. What had originally been conceived as a device the United States might use selectively was being abused, Blee thought.

  “In the early days, for our consciences we wanted to know who we were killing before anyone pulled the trigger,” Blee said. “Now, we’re lighting these people up all over the place.”

  The pistons of the killing machine, he said, operate entirely without friction. “Every drone strike is an execution,” Blee said. “And if we are going to hand down death sentences, there ought to be some public accountability and some public discussion about the whole thing.”

  He paused. “And it should be a debate that Americans can understand.”

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  ABOUT AN HOUR OUTSIDE of Las Vegas, after the stucco houses of the city’s suburbs have disappeared and the landscape has turned into low creosote shrubs and spiky Joshua trees, the highway swings to the west and descends into a valley. A cluster of low, beige buildings appears in the distance, and above them a small plane resembling an insect flies slow, lazy circles in the sky. It rises
over a cluster of hills to the right of the highway, turns to the left, and touches down on a runway carved out of the desert sand.

  The town of Indian Springs, Nevada, elevation 3,123 feet, can be seen in a three-minute drive. It is mostly a collection of RV parks and mobile homes, served by two gas stations, a motel, and Auntie Moe’s Trading Post. A billboard above the post office advertises the nearest chain amenities: DENNY’S, SUBWAY, MOTEL 6 — 1 HOUR AHEAD. The small casino where Curt Hawes and his team had a celebratory breakfast in February 2001, after making history by firing the first missile from a Predator, still sits at the edge of town. But like the rest of Indian Springs, it’s mostly empty; thanks to a new bypass road, it is no longer a stop for tourists on their way to Death Valley from Las Vegas.

  The lonely town has reaped none of the benefits of the robust growth taking place just across the highway, behind miles of fencing and guard posts, where armed soldiers deny entry to the curious. It was in the middle of the last decade that Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field was renamed Creech Air Force Base, and the ramshackle, windswept base where the early Predator test pilots tinkered with a new way of war began its transformation into ground zero for American killing operations overseas. Sitting on twenty-three hundred acres of desert, Creech is now so busy that the Air Force is hoping to expand the base by buying land from local businesses, a move that could render Indian Springs even more of a ghost town.

  Both the Pentagon and CIA fly drone missions out of Creech, and military personnel and civilian contractors involved in the drone program still commute to the base from the Las Vegas suburbs, pulling shifts in long, sand-colored trailers lined up into neat rows. Sometimes they fly training missions at Creech, navigating the Predators and Reapers near the base, honing their deadly skills by tracking civilian cars and trucks driving along lonely roads. But mostly the pilots are fighting a war thousands of miles away—in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, and across the great desert expanse of North Africa. In the weeks after the September 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Libya, the skies above Benghazi filled with the buzzing sound of American drones, sent there to track down the perpetrators of the attack.