The Way of the Knife Read online

  At the edge of the Nevada base, washed-out red cement barriers carry a proud message:

  CREECH AFB: HOME OF THE HUNTERS

  EPILOGUE: A SPY IN LEISURE WORLD

  “This is where the business is going.”

  —Dewey Clarridge

  Dewey Clarridge fell down. A year after the Pentagon shuttered his private spying operation, Clarridge stumbled in his house near San Diego and broke several bones. The accident put him in the hospital, where he was more ornery than usual, and forced him to relocate to the East Coast to be closer to his family. The seventy-nine-year-old former CIA officer—the founder of the agency’s Counterterrorist Center, one of the principal public villains of the Iran–Contra scandal, and the man who once bragged about coming up with the idea of mining the harbors of Nicaragua while he was drinking gin—moved to Leisure World.

  He rented an apartment in one of the high-rise towers that dominates Leisure World’s leafy campus, twenty-five miles from Washington, D.C., a retirement village trying to reel in baby boomers by marketing itself as “The Destination for the Ageless Generation.” A Yankee Republican born during the Depression, Clarridge was hardly a boomer and generally detested much of what the generation had come to represent.

  I drove out to meet him in June 2012, unsure of what kind of a reception I would get. I had written a good deal about Clarridge, and much of it I knew he didn’t like. But he greeted me warmly when I pulled up to the Italian restaurant on the retirement village’s property, where Clarridge appeared to be the only customer and had taken a table to enjoy the late afternoon sun. He looked like any other retiree. He was dressed in a salmon-colored shirt, unbuttoned at the top to allow the gold chain around his neck to peek out. He wore sneakers and white socks and somehow was tanner than he had been when living in San Diego. He told me he had adjusted to his new surroundings but complained that his cats were less than pleased. “Everyone here has dogs. Those little dogs.”

  It was a bit ironic that Clarridge was now living just miles from the CIA, an agency he viewed largely with scorn, but he didn’t seem to miss California or lament his move back to the East Coast.

  “This is where the business is going,” he said.

  By “the business” he meant the private intelligence business. And he was right. The drive out of Washington to the exurban retirement village cut through the gleaming glass towers and sprawling office parks of Northern Virginia that, over the past decade, had sprouted almost from nothing. America’s defense and intelligence industries, once spread throughout the country in places like Southern California and the Midwest, had gradually consolidated and relocated to the Washington area. The companies chose to move closer to what they called “the customer”: the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence services. Government contractors large and small now form a ring around the capital like an army laying siege to a medieval town.

  The private military and intelligence business was booming. By 2012, the global battlefield had stretched America’s secret army beyond its capacities. The CIA and other intelligence services had outsourced some of their most essential missions to private contractors, who were being hired for espionage missions and to carry out intelligence analysis. They were hired to support CIA drone operations: from sitting in ground-control stations in Nevada to loading missiles and bombs onto the drones at classified bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel for the CIA and now partner in a prestigious Washington law firm, represents some of the companies that have won black contracts for doing military or intelligence work. It is stunning, Smith told me, how much the American government has outsourced the basic functions of spycraft to private contractors (many of the companies led by former CIA officers and special-operations troops), who promise they can do a better job than federal employees. Erik Prince sold off Blackwater and moved to the United Arab Emirates, but other companies took its place, companies that do a far better job staying out of the headlines than Blackwater did. As the American way of war has moved away from clashes between tank columns, outside the declared war zones and into the shadows, a cottage industry has materialized to become an indispensable part of a new military-intelligence complex.

  Smith sometimes bristles at the relentlessly negative portrayal of private contractors, but he also sees the potential for trouble if the needs of the mission conflict with a company’s profit imperative. “There’s an inevitable tension as to where the contractor’s loyalties lie,” he said. “Do they lie with the flag? Or do they lie with the bottom line?”

  By the middle of 2012, Michele Ballarin was still trying hard to win another long-term government contract for her work in Africa, and she saw opportunity in the chaos that was spreading across the northern part of the continent. After radical Islamists took over a vast stretch of desert in northern Mali, and after it became clear that Washington once again was struggling to get intelligence about a country it had long ignored, Ballarin told me she was making contacts with Tuareg rebels in the eastern part of Mali and was hatching a plan to drive Islamists out of the country. She didn’t elaborate.

  Her planning wasn’t limited to Africa. Ballarin was looking for investors for a new project to build a fleet of seaplanes modeled after the original Grumman G-21 Goose, planes that she thought the American military could use to land troops in remote locations that didn’t have working airstrips. She was even scouting business opportunities in Cuba that might make her rich once Fidel Castro finally died and Communism in Cuba came to an end.

  That summer day in 2012, it seemed very unlikely that Dewey Clarridge would ever again dip his cup into the stream of government money going to intelligence contractors. His operation with Michael Furlong had concluded ignominiously, and Furlong had quietly been forced into retirement. Clarridge was still angry about how the episode ended. As he saw it, it was yet another example of bureaucrats in Washington protecting their turf at the expense of soldiers in the field, who desperately needed the intelligence he could provide, if only to avoid relying on the CIA. But he said he was determined to stay in the game. He told me he still kept his network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some of whom could be maintained on a shoestring budget. If Washington was too foolish to make use of his people, he said, maybe another friendly government might be more enlightened.

  He lit a cigar and turned philosophical.

  “I think the Treaty of Westphalia is over,” he said. He was talking about the seventeenth-century peace accords in Europe that ended the Thirty Years’ War, three bloody decades of fighting among kings and emperors who sometimes used mercenaries as cannon fodder for the major battles. The Treaty of Westphalia, most historians agree, led to the birth of modern nations, standing armies, and national identities.

  “Nation states no longer have a monopoly on military force,” he said. It was corporations and private interests, he said, that would be the future of America’s wars. “Just look at our own system. The only thing that isn’t outsourced is the guy shooting the gun.”

  It was a rare moment when Dewey Clarridge was actually understating a situation. At times since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States had even outsourced the trigger pulling. Whether it was Erik Prince, Enrique Prado, and Blackwater hired by the CIA to hunt terrorists, or hired muscle like Raymond Davis driving through the streets of Lahore with a Glock semiautomatic in his glove box, or private soldiers dodging mortars during an all-night firefight on the roof of a CIA base in Benghazi, the chaotic first years of America’s shadow war had seen the United States willing to farm out government’s most elemental function: protecting the state.

  It was getting late, and I got up to leave. Clarridge decided to stay and finish his cigar. We shook hands, and I walked to my car. Driving away, I glanced back at Dewey, sitting alone at the table of the retirement home’s empty restaurant. A thin trail of cigar smoke curled up into the dying light.

  Senator Frank C
hurch, holding a gun the CIA had built to shoot poison darts, led an investigation into CIA assassination operations during the spy agency’s early years. The hearings led to greater congressional oversight of the CIA and the agency abandoned lethal activities for decades.

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (left) was angry that the military was slow to begin its invasion of Afghanistan. He sought to expand the Pentagon’s special-operations capabilities and to broaden his department’s legal powers to wage war across the globe. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan (right) refused to allow American ground troops inside Pakistan but gave his blessing to CIA drone flights.

  Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a spy of the old school, was in charge of the CIA’s covert wars in Latin America during the Reagan administration. He later founded the agency’s Counterterrorist Center. Clarridge, who was indicted for perjury for his testimony on the Iran–Contra scandal, is pictured here leaving court in 1991.

  He received a presidential pardon and reemerged years later as one of the principal figures in a spying operation run by the Pentagon to collect intelligence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  Following a bitter fight inside the CIA about whether the agency should get back into the killing business by using armed drones, the Predator has become one of the most widely used weapons of America’s secret war. Both the CIA and the Pentagon have conducted hundreds of drone strikes, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen.

  President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, pictured with a knife in his belt, became a counter-terrorism partner for Presidents Bush and Obama. He allowed both the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command to operate inside his country. A CIA Predator strike in Yemen in 2002 was the spy agency’s first drone strike outside of Afghanistan.

  Jose Rodriguez spent his career in the CIA’s Latin America division before joining the agency’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC). As the leader of the CTC, and eventually as the head of all clandestine operations, Rodriguez accelerated the CIA’s transformation into a paramilitary agency.

  Ross Newland joined the CIA in the late 1970s when the spy agency was trying to refocus on foreign espionage activities after being chastened by the Church Committee investigation. He served as a clandestine officer in a number of Latin American capitals and was the CIA station chief in Bucharest, Romania, during the fall of Communism. When the September 11 attacks occurred, he was one of a small group of senior officers at Langley overseeing the Predator program.

  James “Bo” Gritz (right), a former Green Beret, organized a privately funded mission during the 1980s to rescue American POWs he believed were being held in central Laos. The Intelligence Support Activity, an obscure Pentagon spying unit, supported Gritz’s mission without notifying the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had been planning a parallel rescue mission. In the years before the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon’s human spying activities were uncoordinated and resulted in several internal investigations.

  Nek Muhammad Wazir led a rebellion in Pakistan’s tribal areas where his militia fighters fought Pakistan’s army to a standstill. At the Shakai tribal meeting in 2004 (pictured), Nek Muhammad (foreground) and a Pakistani general agreed to a truce. But Nek Muhammad did not honor the ceasefire, and Pakistani officials were so furious that they gave the CIA their blessing to hunt him down. He was the first person killed in Pakistan by a CIA Predator.

  General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani (right) took over Pakistan’s spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in 2004. He was close to President Musharraf and eventually became the country’s top military officer, making him the most powerful man in Pakistan. Lt. General Ahmad Shuja Pasha (left) took over the ISI in 2008.

  As the founder of Blackwater USA, Erik Prince became indispensible to a CIA that was straining to meet the demands of multiple wars. Blackwater guards protected CIA officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Prince himself was hired by the spy agency for an assassination program developed after the September 11 attacks.

  For several months in 2006, Art Keller was stationed at two CIA bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas where he had a fraught relationship with the ISI.

  Michael Furlong was part of the Pentagon’s expansion of “information operations;” he helped develop video games designed to influence opinions in the Middle East and allow the military to collect intelligence about the game players. He was the Pentagon official overseeing Dewey Clarridge’s private spying operation in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  After the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, a once obscure militia calling itself al Shabaab (“The Youth”) grew in strength and eventually took control of Mogadishu. Shabaab fighters, pictured here in 2008, enforced strict sharia law in the capital.

  Michele “Amira” Ballarin, an heiress and onetime congressional candidate living in Virginia horse country, became obsessed with Somalia and made frequent trips to the Horn of Africa. In 2008, the Pentagon hired her to gather intelligence inside Somalia, and she eventually inserted herself into the middle of ransom negotiations between Somali pirates and merchant ship owners.

  A large American delegation, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (right), flew to Saudi Arabia in June 2012 for a memorial service after the death of Saudi crown prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz. Saudi officials have been close partners with the Obama administration throughout the American war in Yemen. John Brennan, President Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser and a former CIA station chief in Riyadh, is pictured over Panetta’s left shoulder. Brennan was one of the architects of the Obama administration’s secret war in Yemen, and in 2013 Obama tapped him to run the CIA.

  When Panetta was CIA director, he clashed often with Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair (to Panetta’s left), who warned that the Obama administration had become too enamored with the CIA and covert action. Blair was pushed out of the job after fifteen months.

  Ibrahim al-Asiri, the master bomb maker for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Asiri built a bomb that was surgically implanted in his brother, who blew himself up attempting to kill a senior Saudi official. Later, Asiri constructed a bomb that was sewn into the underwear of a young Nigerian man who attempted to blow up a jetliner as it descended into Detroit.

  Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, shot and killed two men he believed were trying to rob him at a crowded traffic circle in Lahore, Pakistan. Davis sat in prison for weeks as American officials denied to Pakistan’s government that Davis worked for the CIA. For Pakistani officials, the Davis case proved that the CIA had deployed a large cadre of spies inside Pakistan without the ISI’s knowledge.

  Hafiz Muhammad Saeed (center), the charismatic leader of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. The group, using a political front organization, operates openly around Lahore and is believed by American officials to maintain close contacts with the ISI. In early 2011, a group of CIA officers in Lahore—including Raymond Davis—were trying to gather intelligence about Saeed and his group.

  Admiral Mike Mullen (far left), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was one of the few senior Obama administration officials who tried to maintain close relations with Pakistani officials. He made frequent trips to Islamabad and developed a friendship with General Kayani (second from right). The warm relations ended after Mullen became convinced that the ISI was supporting the Haqqani Network’s attacks in Afghanistan.

  Dr. Shakil Afridi (left), a Pakistani physician, was hired by the CIA to run a vaccination program in Abbottabad. The CIA was hoping that the ruse would unearth evidence that Osama bin Laden was hiding in a large compound (right) in the town.

  Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric born in the United States, was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Two weeks later, another drone strike mistakenly killed his teenage son.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a book involves making hundreds of decisions, and with a first book it’s very difficult to know how many of those decisions are good ones. I am extraordinarily lucky that one of the fi
rst decisions I made was among the best, which was to hire Adam Ahmad to be my research assistant. From our first meeting, over coffee in Chicago, where he was finishing his master’s, I could tell that Adam was bright, curious, and dedicated. He proved to be all those things and so much more. He was an absolutely integral part of the book during all of its phases. He researched documents, wrote background papers, organized endnotes, and in several cases managed to track down an Urdu speaker to translate documents and recordings neither of us could understand. When I arrived at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Jessica Schulberg joined the project and provided research help every bit as valuable as Adam’s. Jessica has a particular interest in Africa, and her ability to unearth information about Somalia and North Africa was awe inspiring. She is a clear thinker and is wise beyond her years. During the course of writing this book, I have come to value not only Adam and Jessica’s guidance but also their friendship. They both have long and bright careers ahead of them, whatever paths they choose.