Find, Fix, Finish (35 page)
Authors: Aki Peritz,Eric Rosenbach
America’s aggressive moves in terrorist safe havens can also produce tragic, counterproductive, unintended consequences. In May 2010, in Yemen’s Marib province—where al-Harethi had met his fiery end eight years earlier—a US aerial assault killed several suspected al-Qaeda operatives.
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However, this strike accidentally killed the deputy governor of the province, who, due to his standing among the local tribes, had been trying to convince the militants to surrender to government forces. This official’s accidental death at the hands of the US prompted local tribesmen to attack an oil pipeline in revenge, and handed AQAP a propaganda victory, overshadowing the deaths of a number of low-level, easily replaceable operatives.
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However, this strike accidentally killed the deputy governor of the province, who, due to his standing among the local tribes, had been trying to convince the militants to surrender to government forces. This official’s accidental death at the hands of the US prompted local tribesmen to attack an oil pipeline in revenge, and handed AQAP a propaganda victory, overshadowing the deaths of a number of low-level, easily replaceable operatives.
Firing missiles at houses and vehicles containing suspected terrorists in faraway lands from the comfort of a US base of operations has a certain visceral, short-term finishing quality to it, as a bad guy is eliminated. Ultimately, targeting individuals for death in distant blighted lands is a short-term tactical maneuver. It is not a coherent enough strategy to achieve mission-critical US national security goals. A decade after 9/11, playing whack-a-mole with al-Qaeda operatives has not proven to be an effective eradication strategy.
CHAPTER 11
GERONIMO
T
here are worse places than Abbottabad to meet one’s end. Named after James Abbott, a resourceful British officer who gained notoriety in the region during the Sikh wars of the late 1840s, this pleasant Raj-era hill station retreat a few hours north of Islamabad is nestled between the pine forests of the surrounding Shimla and Sarban peaks. The truck-congested Karakoram Highway, a ribbon of gravel and asphalt that stretches from Pakistan to China through the Khunjerab pass, runs through the center of town. Abbottabad is a good stopping-off point for travelers to spend a night, enjoy a meal, or stretch their legs.
here are worse places than Abbottabad to meet one’s end. Named after James Abbott, a resourceful British officer who gained notoriety in the region during the Sikh wars of the late 1840s, this pleasant Raj-era hill station retreat a few hours north of Islamabad is nestled between the pine forests of the surrounding Shimla and Sarban peaks. The truck-congested Karakoram Highway, a ribbon of gravel and asphalt that stretches from Pakistan to China through the Khunjerab pass, runs through the center of town. Abbottabad is a good stopping-off point for travelers to spend a night, enjoy a meal, or stretch their legs.
Abbottabad is home to the Pakistan Military Academy, the training grounds for Pakistan’s junior military officers. Many military men retire to this part of the country, taking advantage of the cool air and one of the best golf clubs in the nation. Abbottabad also has a fairly large Christian community, and a few notable churches dot the city’s landscape. But for all its beauty, it is perhaps best known as the final home for the most hunted man of the twenty-first century, Osama bin Laden.
In the early morning darkness of May 2, 2011, America came to collect its due.
At the end of a dirt road on the outskirts of town, inside a heavily secured multistory compound built specifically for him, the al-Qaeda leader went about his daily routine surrounded by a small group of confidants and family members. Guarded by barbed wire–topped walls, the compound was cut off from the outside world. The residents lived off the grid, burned their own trash, and were singularly unfriendly to the locals, even confiscating a soccer ball that some neighborhood kids had accidentally kicked into the compound.
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Around 1:00 AM on a pitch-black night, at least two specially rigged MH-60 Blackhawk helicopters flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, informally known as the Night Stalkers
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descended on the one-acre structure.
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Two dozen members of the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU)—commonly known as the Navy SEALs—accompanied by an interpreter and a dog named Cairo, emerged with one target in mind. They were willing to take him dead or alive. Sweeping through the compound with silenced weapons, the elite troops cleared one room after another, eliminating threats with gruesome efficiency. Finally, in a hallway outside the main bedchamber, three officers saw enemy number one rush into another room.
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They followed him in.
,
descended on the one-acre structure.
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Two dozen members of the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU)—commonly known as the Navy SEALs—accompanied by an interpreter and a dog named Cairo, emerged with one target in mind. They were willing to take him dead or alive. Sweeping through the compound with silenced weapons, the elite troops cleared one room after another, eliminating threats with gruesome efficiency. Finally, in a hallway outside the main bedchamber, three officers saw enemy number one rush into another room.
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They followed him in.
President Barack Obama and other top American officials anxiously sat in the White House Situation Room thousands of miles away and listened to their secure communications. An anonymous message finally crackled over the line: “Geronimo E-KIA.” America’s bête noire—the individual responsible for killing thousands of innocent people worldwide and the bogeyman who animated a radical shift in US society—was dead. The president translated the message simply, saying to no one in particular, “We got him.”
The United States would not have been able to eliminate bin Laden without having refined and rehearsed the updated find-fix-finish counterterrorism doctrine. Many of the tools and techniques brought to find, fix, and finish the al-Qaeda leader—advanced technology, integrated military /analytical forces, and a robust HVT interrogation program, to name a few—barely existed prior to 9/11. Furthermore, the larger legal, political, military, and intelligence effort that contributed in its own inexorable way to the hunt for the most wanted man on the planet mostly evolved after al-Qaeda’s attack against the US homeland. Bin Laden’s eventual death showed that the US could be grimly dedicated and relentless in the pursuit of its goals and the destruction of its enemies.
THE CHEST-THUMPING
operational details of the night raid on bin Laden’s compound have been widely, if not always accurately, reported in the press. But the underlying mechanisms that allowed the US to arrive in Abbottabad are much less well understood.
operational details of the night raid on bin Laden’s compound have been widely, if not always accurately, reported in the press. But the underlying mechanisms that allowed the US to arrive in Abbottabad are much less well understood.
America was able to raid bin Laden’s compound because of the tactical and strategic knowledge that US and allied countries had generated about the al-Qaeda organization since 9/11. One of the major multiagency efforts focused on how al-Qaeda leaders communicated with their followers and with each other. Top leaders needed to issue orders, and they usually did so via a complex, multilayered human courier network. To preserve operational security, this network consisted of trusted human runners who physically transmitted important messages between points in the network or, perhaps for the most secret and critical messages, from memory.
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This system provided the protection that al-Qaeda’s leaders needed—many of them entirely distrusted electronic communications, with good reason—but it was laboriously slow. Relaying a message could take as long as a month.
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This system provided the protection that al-Qaeda’s leaders needed—many of them entirely distrusted electronic communications, with good reason—but it was laboriously slow. Relaying a message could take as long as a month.
Some members of al-Qaeda found this terribly annoying. In a declassified letter recovered from the house of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bin Laden’s emissary in Iran, Libyan national Atiyah Abd al-Rahman—killed in a drone strike in Pakistan in late August 2011—described his difficulties in communicating and urged Zarqawi to send a human messenger to Pakistan to establish a reliable communications line with the top leadership.
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Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf divulged in his memoir that Pakistani intelligence intercepted some of the courier traffic and that the system included distinct layers for administration, operations, media support, and the top leadership.
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Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf divulged in his memoir that Pakistani intelligence intercepted some of the courier traffic and that the system included distinct layers for administration, operations, media support, and the top leadership.
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Surprisingly, bin Laden continued to play the role of a hands-on CEO, using a simple—and hardly NSA proof—means of communicating with the outside world.
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After writing out his notes and uploading them onto a USB drive, he would turn it over to a courier, a trusted al-Qaeda member, who would then head to one of the thousands of Internet cafés in Pakistan to disseminate the leader’s commands. It remains unclear whether bin Laden received messages in this manner as well.
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After writing out his notes and uploading them onto a USB drive, he would turn it over to a courier, a trusted al-Qaeda member, who would then head to one of the thousands of Internet cafés in Pakistan to disseminate the leader’s commands. It remains unclear whether bin Laden received messages in this manner as well.
The main lead to locating bin Laden came from one of these trusted couriers, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Abu Ahmed was a Kuwait-bred Pakistani national, and was one of the last individuals at large with ties to al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 leaders. He was a trusted confidant of KSM and later Abu Faraj al-Libi.
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Despite the fact that the US had detained KSM and al-Libi since 2003 and 2005, respectively, they obscured Abu Ahmed’s pivotal role in al-Qaeda. Another al-Qaeda courier, Hassan Ghul, captured in Iraq in 2004, shed a little more light on al-Kuwaiti’s identity.
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Within America’s robust overt and covert detention facilities, spread across continents, certain pieces of the puzzle were waiting to be unearthed.
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Despite the fact that the US had detained KSM and al-Libi since 2003 and 2005, respectively, they obscured Abu Ahmed’s pivotal role in al-Qaeda. Another al-Qaeda courier, Hassan Ghul, captured in Iraq in 2004, shed a little more light on al-Kuwaiti’s identity.
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Within America’s robust overt and covert detention facilities, spread across continents, certain pieces of the puzzle were waiting to be unearthed.
In the movies, information leads logically and inexorably toward a conclusion, but in the real world, intelligence analysis is more of a mundane activity performed by low- and mid-range bureaucrats sitting in Beltway Brutalist–style buildings synthesizing thousands of documents of mostly useless material. Various classified and unclassified databases feed this fire hose of information, but at the end of the day, it is a person or a team of persons who have to make sense of the story—if indeed there is any.
If you listened to George W. Bush’s last attorney general, Michael Mukasey, you might have believed that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were vital to gaining the information that allowed bin Laden to be located:
Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information—including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden.
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John Yoo, who helped author the 2002 OLC memos outlining the contours of harsh interrogation at the Department of Justice, glossed over the subtleties of intelligence gathering in the
Wall Street Journal
: “The United States located al-Qaeda’s leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.”
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Wall Street Journal
: “The United States located al-Qaeda’s leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.”
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But if harsh interrogations, as opposed to other means of intelligence gathering, could elicit excellent and time-sensitive information that decisively led to bin Laden, the US would have arrived in Abbottabad many years earlier. KSM certainly provided his interrogators with a great deal of information—including crazy, incomplete, false, and misleading scraps of data along with some good bits. But the rough interrogation seemed to have more or less ceased by 2005–2006, which means all the drips and drabs of information gained by these controversial mechanisms were consigned to the proverbial back of the classified database by the time the SEALs descended into bin Laden’s compound.
As has been noted time and again, prisoners under physical duress often say anything to stop the coercion, but the lines between truth and untruth can be blurry. Even the CIA director seemed to be operating in the fog of uncertainty whether harsh techniques led to tangible information that may have led the US to Abu Ahmed. In an interview by NBC’s Brian Williams, then-CIA director Leon Panetta could not give a clear answer, even if he, perhaps, wanted to:
I think some of the detainees clearly were, you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that, you know, the debate about whether—whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.
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Senator John McCain, long an opponent of waterboarding and other violent interrogation techniques, put another stake into the coercive interrogation argument soon after the raid when he stated that in fact a foreign intelligence service had produced the first tantalizing slivers of data to Abu Ahmad’s identity and whereabouts:
I asked CIA Director Leon Panetta for the facts, and he told me the following: The trail to bin Laden did not begin with a disclosure from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times. The first mention of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti—the nickname of the al-Qaeda courier who ultimately led us to bin Laden—as well as a description of him as an important member of al-Qaeda, came from a detainee held in another country, who we believe was not tortured. None of the three detainees who were waterboarded provided Abu Ahmed’s real name, his whereabouts or an accurate description of his role in al-Qaeda.In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator—none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee—information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden—was obtained through standard, noncoercive means.
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It remains unclear whether harsh techniques indeed led to bits and pieces of possibly relevant information but one thing is certain: brutal interrogations certainly did not lead directly to bin Laden’s compound. A leaked letter from Panetta to McCain said as much: “In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.”
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Legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick summed up the larger inherent problems with using torture, and why many apologists come out of the woodwork to defend it long after it occurred:
That’s the problem with doing stupid things: You spend the rest of your life trying to convince yourself that maybe they weren’t so stupid after all. Had we not water-boarded prisoners eight years ago, nobody would be making the argument that water-boarding “worked.” The reason you don’t order up torture in the first place is that once you do, it stays on the menu for years.
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