The Way of the Knife Read online

5: THE ANGRY BIRD

  “This is a political war and it calls for discrimination in killing. The best weapon for killing would be a knife, but I’m afraid we can’t do it that way. The worst is an airplane.”

  —Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann, American officer in Vietnam

  Officers inside the operations room at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center watched video of the Toyota Land Cruiser bumping over the desert road in Yemen’s Ma’rib province, the legendary birthplace of the Queen of Sheba. It was an uncomfortable ride for the six men crammed into the dusty four-by-four, but nothing about the truck typically would have raised suspicions among Yemeni police or soldiers on that day in November 2002. But from the backseat of the truck, a cell phone belonging to Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was betraying the location of the most wanted man in Yemen. An armed CIA Predator was flying overhead.

  The United States had fingered al-Harethi as the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the destroyer U.S.S. Cole, an attack that killed seventeen sailors as the ship was refueling in the Gulf of Aden. The attack had put al-Harethi near the top of the Bush administration’s list of al Qaeda operatives marked for death, and when a team of American special-operations troops landed in Yemen in the spring of 2002, they made hunting al-Harethi a priority. But al-Harethi was a veteran of the mujahedeen war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and whatever survival skills he hadn’t learned while battling the Soviets he had honed during a decade of hiding from the secret police in the United Arab Emirates and from the shock troops loyal to Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh. In 2000, Osama bin Laden had sent al-Harethi to Yemen to plan the Cole bombing and to set up al Qaeda training camps. More than once, al-Harethi had embarrassed President Saleh by escaping capture just as Yemeni troops were closing in.

  The mercurial Saleh had immediately seen the financial benefits of siding with the United States in its new war but had insisted that the Bush administration do it on his terms. He had managed to stay in power in Yemen since the 1970s by navigating the shoals of tribal blood feuds and Shi‘ite separatists, and he wasn’t about to let America begin a stealth war in his country without getting something in return. On a trip to Washington two months after the September 11 attacks, he managed to wrangle $400 million in aid during meetings with President Bush, Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet. He gave his blessing to a small group of American special-operations troops coming to Yemen but insisted that they fire weapons only in self-defense. Without telling Saleh, the Pentagon also sent operatives from Gray Fox, the Army spying unit that specialized in intercepting communications, along with the commandos.

  And yet Saleh had been an easy sell when it came to the Predator.

  In spring 2002, Ambassador Edmund Hull requested a meeting to get the Yemeni president to agree to drone flights in the country. By then, Hull knew Saleh well enough to know about his wild mood swings and what talking points might best advance the spy agency’s case. A group of CIA officers, who had arrived from Langley days earlier, brought a laptop computer with an animated video demonstrating how the drones worked. The video included graphics of Hellfire missiles hitting cars and mud compounds. Saleh broke into a smile as he watched, and he seemed proud that Yemen would be the first place outside of Afghanistan that the CIA was preparing to use the Predator.

  But the Americans still had to find al-Harethi, who eluded surveillance by switching between five different cell-phone numbers. The Gray Fox team had identified several of them, but al-Harethi was always careful enough to use the phones sparingly. On November 4, however, the surveillance net got its first big catch.

  The cell phone in the back of the Land Cruiser was beaming its signal into the skies, and Gray Fox operatives sent a flash message to analysts at the National Security Agency’s sprawling headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland. Separately, the CIA had dispatched an armed Predator from its drone base in Djibouti, just across the Red Sea from Yemen. As the Predator moved into position above the Land Cruiser, an analyst at Fort Meade heard al-Harethi’s voice over the cell phone, barking directions to the driver of the four-by-four. With confirmation that al-Harethi was in the truck, the CIA was now authorized to fire a missile at the vehicle. The missile came off the Predator drone and destroyed the truck, killing everyone inside. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was eventually identified in the rubble by a distinguishing mark on one of his legs, which was found at the scene, severed from his body.

  President Saleh’s government was quick to issue a cover story: The truck had been carrying a canister of gas that triggered an explosion. But inside the Counterterrorist Center, the importance of the moment was not lost. It was the first time since the September 11 attacks that the CIA had carried out a targeted killing outside a declared war zone. Using the sweeping authority President Bush had given to the CIA in September 2001, clandestine officers had methodically gathered information about al-Harethi’s movements and then coolly incinerated his vehicle with an antitank missile.

  —

  BY THIS TIME, many inside the spy agency had forgotten that the CIA had never really wanted the armed drone. It had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the CIA were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Little more than a year before the Yemen strike, a debate was still raging as spies fought with spies about the morality of using drones to kill terrorists. Charles E. Allen, a longtime CIA analyst and a fierce advocate for the Predator, would later describe the whole period as a “bloody struggle.”

  By the late 1990s, Ross Newland’s generation of CIA officers, who had joined the agency after the revelations of the Church Committee and President Ford’s ban on assassinations, had ascended to leadership positions at Langley. The rise to power of the post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the CIA chose to conduct around the world. The agency’s paramilitary branch had been allowed to wither, a reflection of the CIA’s antipathy toward returning to the wars of the past. The CIA was even divided about whether it could justifiably kill Osama bin Laden. One former head of the Counterterrorist Center would later tell the 9/11 Commission that he would have refused a direct order to kill bin Laden in the years before the September 11 attacks.

  “The corporate view inside CIA was ‘We don’t want to do covert action. And if we do covert action, we want it to be neat and clean. We don’t want to be involved in killing people. Because we’re not like that. We’re not Mossad,’” said Richard Clarke, who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations as the top White House official responsible for counterterrorism.

  By 2000, the year that Newland left undercover operations in the field for a senior management job at Langley as a CIA liaison to the Pentagon, bin Laden had repeatedly shown he could strike at the time and place of his choosing, from the American-embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, to the attack on the Cole in Yemen two years later. The Clinton administration had few good ideas when it came to figuring out where the al Qaeda leader was at any given time and then killing him before he went somewhere else.

  Inside the White House Situation Room, discussions about bin Laden turned into abstract debates about whether the White House might be violating the 1976 ban on assassinations by choosing one killing method over another. Clarke remembered one meeting when National Security Advisor Sandy Berger became so enraged by the debates, he shouted at everyone in the room. “He said, ‘So, you guys are perfectly OK if Bill Clinton kills bin Laden with a Tomahawk missile, but if Bill Clinton kills him with a 7.62-millimeter round in the middle of the eyes, that’s bad? Could you tell me the difference between killing him with a Tomahawk and an M16?’

  “Berger was about to have a heart attack,” said Clarke. “He was all sweaty and red in the face and yelling at them.”

  President Clinton wasn’t amused by the lack of options. “You know,” Clinton told Joint Chiefs chairman General Hugh Shelton, “it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas r
appelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.”

  Not having ninjas at its disposal, the Pentagon had agreed to station two submarines in the Arabian Sea that could fire Tomahawk cruise missiles into Afghanistan on short notice. But without fresh intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts, the submarines were of little use, and top admirals began agitating to move them elsewhere.

  The CIA had one Taliban source feeding information to the Americans, but his tips were usually twenty-four hours old, insufficient for White House approval of missile strikes into Afghanistan. Flailing for ideas, clandestine officers met with American defense contractors about building blimps or hot-air balloons to take pictures of Afghanistan at thirty thousand feet but scrapped the idea when they considered the diplomatic calamity if wind gusts from the Hindu Kush mountains were to push a blimp hundreds of miles off course and into China—possibly over a nuclear reactor.

  Clarke had a frosty relationship with George Tenet and James Pavitt, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, and decided to go around them for new ideas. He called senior CIA analyst Charles E. Allen, who had been at the agency for four decades and by then was in his midsixties. Bright, iconoclastic, and ornery, Allen bore scars from the agency’s past battles; the Iran–Contra scandal had dealt his career a glancing blow. But he had also emerged as something of a legend among CIA analysts for being a lonely voice in 1990, predicting that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait. Clarke asked Allen to conduct an independent review of various options for spying in Afghanistan.

  Allen went to the Defense Department for ideas and met with officers working for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. They discussed far-fetched ideas, such as putting a giant telescope on a mountaintop and training it on bin Laden’s Derunta training camp, near Jalalabad, where al Qaeda had experimented with chemical weapons. But there was another, more realistic option. Allen was told about a series of secret tests the Air Force had been conducting in the desert. There was a chance, Pentagon officials said, that the CIA could find bin Laden using a drone.

  By 2000, the MQ-1 Predator was well known inside the small, geeky fraternity of military engineers and intelligence analysts working at the experimental fringes of electronic spying. The Predator had already had some success as a spying tool in the Balkan wars, spotting Serbian troop concentrations and hunting Bosnian Serb leaders. Drone pilots operated the planes out of a hangar in Albania that the CIA had rented in exchange for two truckloads of wool blankets. The drone video was beamed into the office of CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., who communicated with the pilots through a crude e-mail link. Woolsey had managed to get a small stash of money to fund the project from Representative Charlie Wilson, the hard-drinking Texas congressman who had used similar budget trickery to fund the CIA’s war in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

  The mountainous terrain in the Balkans had made it impossible to fly the drones using “line of sight” technology—with the pilot operating the drone through a direct signal to the airplane—so during the 1990s the military had made strides flying the Predators by bouncing a signal off a satellite hurtling through space. But the Predator couldn’t carry a weapon. It also looked like a gangly insect and had a loud engine that made it sound like a flying lawnmower. Unlike most planes, its stabilizers pointed down rather than thrusting up into the sky, and when one major trade magazine published its first story about the Predator, the photo was upside down. But a handful of Air Force officers inside the service’s flyboy culture saw the potential in unmanned systems and began advocating for the Predator.

  Allen brought the Predator idea back to Richard Clarke at the White House. They figured that both Tenet and Pavitt would be against the idea, so they waited to tell them about the Predator option until a plan had been cobbled together to send the Predator into Afghanistan. Without telling Tenet, Clarke called a White House meeting and invited the Predator’s biggest advocates: Charlie Allen, CTC chief Cofer Black, and Richard Blee, the head of the CTC’s bin Laden hunting unit, which had been given the code name Alec Station.

  Blee was a career case officer who had served in several CIA stations in Africa, and shortly after he took over Alec Station, in 1999, he led a team into Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley to reestablish CIA contact with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, whom al Qaeda would end up killing just two days before the September 11 attacks. Blee was smart and intense but occasionally sullen, leading some of his colleagues to think of him as aloof. He had grown up a CIA brat, the son of a head of the CIA’s Soviet division who had battled with the agency’s legendary head of counterintelligence, James Angleton, over the direction of clandestine operations against the Soviet Union. David Blee won the fight and successfully penetrated the KGB with dozens of highly placed moles during the 1970s. Now his son was at the front of a very different CIA war.

  By Memorial Day weekend 2000, Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, thought that the CIA had dickered around too long about the Predator and demanded a decision on the drone flights. General John Gordon, the CIA’s deputy director, arranged a hasty meeting at Langley that quickly degenerated into a shouting match. Pavitt, who by then had been told about the Predator option, made it clear he opposed having CIA spy flights over Afghanistan. “Where would the drones be based?” he asked, and “what if they were shot down?” The CIA shouldn’t be operating its own air force, Pavitt said. The meeting, one participant said, became “a really ugly scene.”

  After the session, Allen called Clarke to tell him about Pavitt’s opposition. Clarke thought Pavitt’s worries were ludicrous and that the plan presented almost zero risk. “You know,” he told Allen, “if the Predator gets shot down, the pilot goes home and fucks his wife. It’s OK. There’s no POW issue here.”

  Tenet was also skeptical when he heard about the Predator days later, and he didn’t relish the prospect of asking Uzbekistani strongman Islam Karimov to allow the CIA to base Predators at an old Soviet air base near the Afghan border. At the time, the idea of the CIA establishing military-style bases anywhere in the world seemed crazy—and a drain on the agency’s limited budget for covert action.

  By June, however, Clarke had won the argument, and the White House had approved moving Predators to the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base, in Uzbekistan. But CIA officers had another problem: how to get enough satellite bandwidth for the drone flights. Air Force engineers by that point had devised a way to fly the Predator from thousands of miles away by bouncing the signal off a satellite and relaying the feed through a ground station in Germany. This allowed the CIA to station Predator pilots very close to home, in a converted racecar trailer set up in a parking lot at Langley. But the agency still had to rent bandwidth from commercial satellite companies, which proved harder than expected. With news organizations sucking up all of the satellite bandwidth in their preparations to cover the Olympic Games in Sydney, the Predators were almost grounded as the CIA frantically searched for a satellite company with transponder space to rent.

  The spying flights began in September 2000, and the CIA flew more than a dozen drone missions over Afghanistan in the fall before the winter winds in the mountains began buffeting the Predator’s fragile airframe, making the flights too risky. Several times, Clarke drove out to Langley to watch the video beamed into the trailer in the parking lot. “It was just science fiction; it was unbelievable,” he said. During one flight over bin Laden’s Tarnak Farms training camp, near Kandahar, the Predator spotted a truck convoy driving into the camp. Out walked a tall man in long white robes. The video was grainy, but every person standing around the video monitor at the CIA was convinced that the camera was trained on bin Laden.

  CIA analysts scrambled to alert the Pentagon and the White House to get approval to launch missiles from the submarines. But officials at the National Security Council demanded to know whether bin Laden was going to be at Tarnak Farms for at least six hours—the time it would take to go through the launch protocols and for the Tomahawk
missiles to fly from a submarine in the Arabian Sea to southern Afghanistan. The CIA had no clue, and so Sandy Berger and his staff declined to approve the strike. The CIA had only two options: predict bin Laden’s whereabouts six hours in advance or find a weapon that could hunt the al Qaeda leader and kill him immediately.

  —

  INDIAN SPRINGS AIR FORCE AUXILIARY FIELD was at the time a small, decaying base in the Nevada desert, some thirty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was one of a myriad of benighted military outposts built during World War II and then forgotten by the Pentagon. In the 1950s and ’60s the base had been a supply hub for the underground nuclear tests nearby, and helicopters stationed at Indian Springs were occasionally flown over the test sites at Mercury and Yucca Flats to monitor for radiation leaks. Save for the occasional training by the Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s demonstration squadron, Indian Springs was a desolate backwater.

  The base also had a bird problem. The skies above Indian Springs were filled with birds, and the Air Force had restricted how often fighter jets could take off from the base due to concerns that the birds could get sucked into jet engines and cause deadly crashes. But as a drone proving ground, Indian Springs was ideal: The aircraft didn’t fly much faster than the birds. At Indian Springs, a small group of test pilots was trying to turn the Predator from a hunter into a killer.

  The housing at the base was scheduled for demolition because the walls of the bungalows were filled with asbestos, so the Predator team traveled each morning from their rented houses in the Las Vegas suburbs to a command post set up at Indian Springs inside an abandoned church building. Curt Hawes, one of the Predator pilots at the base in 2000 and 2001, recalls that his group had a vague idea that the drone testing had been accelerated because the CIA urgently wanted to use the Predator to kill bin Laden, but most of the details about the debate back in Washington were kept from the group at the base.