Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (18 page)

The CIA’s determination to keep information about al-Midhar and al-Hazmi (the other al-Qaeda member headed to the United States) away from its domestic intelligence colleagues has given rise to a justifiable suspicion, shared by Richard Clarke, who was at the time the senior counterterrorism official at the White House, that the agency was nurturing plans to recruit the pair as agents, something it had signally failed to do at any time before 9/11. The accusation drew a heated denial from CIA Director Tenet, Cofer Black, and Richard Blee, who at the time of 9/11 had been a lower-ranking official in the Counterterrorism Center. In their statement rebutting Clarke, Tenet & Co. blandly conceded that “In early 2000, a number of more junior personnel [including FBI agents on detail to CIA] did see travel information on individuals who later became hijackers but the significance of the data was not adequately recognized at the time.”

The Kuala Lumpur meeting of assorted al-Qaeda operatives was monitored at CIA request by Malaysian security, though without yielding any actual information as to what was discussed, and the resultant reports were eagerly scrutinized in Washington. But when al-Midhar and al-Hazmi left for Bangkok, the CIA lost track of them. Meanwhile, the two proto-hijackers had flown to Los Angeles and then settled in San Diego, where they opened bank accounts and obtained drivers’ licenses—even a local phone book listing—all in one or both of their real names. They evidently felt no risk as they waited to gain their reward in heaven.

Two months after the two terrorists had flown out of Bangkok, the CIA bin Laden unit got around to asking Thai security for information on their whereabouts and received word that they had long since departed for Los Angeles and were presumably somewhere in the United States. Though such news would certainly have been of interest to the FBI, it was not passed along, perhaps for unforgivably petty reasons: the CTC had conceived an intense bureaucratic rivalry with and dislike of the chief of the FBI National Security Division in New York, John O’Neill, and therefore felt justified in withholding what was clearly vital information. Had the bureau been aware of their presence, they might have made inquiries of a regular informant in San Diego, Abdusattar Shaikh, from whom, as it happened, al-Midhar and al-Hazmi had rented a room. Shaikh, who later recalled the pair as being “nice, but not what you call extroverted people,” apparently forgot to tell his FBI handler his tenants’ last names or the fact that they were taking flying lessons.

Settling into their new home, the terrorists stayed in regular contact with the organization by phoning al-Midhar’s father-in-law’s house in Yemen, which served as an al-Qaeda message center. These conversations were duly swept up by the NSA’s omnivorous global eavesdropping system, but the intelligence went no further. Many years later, the electronic intelligence agency, under fire thanks to whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s revelations of its mass surveillance programs, would claim that had such programs been in place before 9/11, they would have nipped the attacks in the bud. President Obama himself, in defending the massive domestic “metadata” phone records program, repeated this canard. But, as a number of former senior NSA officials swiftly pointed out, the NSA not only had been intercepting calls to and from the Yemeni house since 1996 but also could very easily have traced them back to San Diego. As it was, the pair was left unmolested, with al-Midhar even taking time to return to Yemen and spend time with his family before moving to temporary lodgings—a motel in Laurel, Maryland, within sight of NSA headquarters—in preparation for that last fatal flight.

Late in the evening of 9/11, the man who succeeded Scheuer as head of the bin Laden unit stopped by the office of an old colleague, a senior agency official not involved in the counterterrorist mission. “We’re fucked,” he said simply, explaining that intelligence about al-Midhar and al-Hazmi living in San Diego and calling al-Qaeda in Yemen had been ignored.

With scenes of the collapsing trade towers and the burning Pentagon endlessly replaying on the TV screens to a traumatized public, the official was entirely justified in assuming that he and his colleagues who had missed all the warnings would suffer severe consequences. But he was entirely wrong. Far from ignominy and sanctions, the CIA’s counterterrorists had a glorious future ahead of them. As a former senior CIA official who watched the process with cynical detachment later described it to me: “On the morning of September 11, 2001, the Counterterrorism Center was a collection of rejects and cast-offs. On the morning of September 12, it was the most powerful organization in the country. Before, they had had to scramble for pennies; now they could ask for billions of dollars and get it. They were briefing the president of the United States.” The briefings struck just the right note with the president, who loved hearing Cofer Black’s macho posturing about “when we’re through with them they will have flies crawling across their eyeballs” and “bringing bin Laden’s head back in a box.” Speaking with regretful affection of the CTC leadership, the former official remarked, “They were my friends. I had worked with many of them. After 9/11 they turned into,” he paused, seeking the right word, “maniacs.”

Formalizing the matter, on September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret “Memorandum of Notification” giving the CIA carte blanche to hunt down and kill high-value targets in the al-Qaeda leadership. Bush also approved a list of about two dozen people whom the CIA was authorized to kill or capture without further presidential review and allowed the addition of names to that list with no permission necessary. On the day he signed the document, Bush spoke with reporters at the Pentagon, saying “I want justice, and there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, saying ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’” Reporting on the presidential “kill list,” the
New York Times
noted: “Despite the authority given to the agency, Mr. Bush has not waived the executive order banning assassinations, officials said. The presidential authority to kill terrorists defines operatives of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for lethal force.” The legal fig leaf outlined by Hays Parks was still respected. To keep track, Bush drew himself a diagram listing potential victims in order of importance, which he kept in a drawer in his office. It was in the shape of a pyramid, with bin Laden’s name at the apex.

The counterterrorists had clearly failed miserably in their appointed task. But their mission was now a national goal. Within a few months of 9/11 their numbers had swelled from three hundred to twelve hundred and would soon soar to over three thousand. They had near-limitless resources. They still had little or no intelligence about the enemy, but they did have what seemed to be the perfect weapon, the newly armed Predator, and a license to kill. The list of targets could only grow.

To accommodate the change,
target
as a verb took on a new meaning. Traditionally,
targeting
meant “focusing intelligence resources on some item of interest,” such as the Soviet Muslim population or the Italian Communist Party or a likely prospect for recruitment as a spy. Now the targets were individual humans, and a new profession of “targeters” was born. Their task was to assemble information on a future victim, his movements, associates, and habits, in order to set him up for the kill. Just as the counterterrorists had been called in from the moribund Soviet and Eastern European desks, targeters were recruited from the ranks of “reports officers.” This comparatively lowly occupation involves editing and rewriting case officers’ reports of intelligence from agents to obscure any clue that might hint at the identity of the source. Now, many of them would be retasked in this new specialty of targeter, which within a few short years would become the fastest career track in the agency, involving fully 20 percent of all CIA analysts. Many targeters spent their entire professional lives doing nothing else, rising steadily through the ranks as they developed greater expertise at hunting people, one by one.

Since many people still thought there was a blanket ban on assassinations, despite Hays Parks’ pronouncement, a name change was clearly called for. So the A-word was supplanted by the more palatable “targeted killing,” which gradually crept into official and popular lexicons. In this, as in so many other aspects of the strategy, the trail was blazed by Israel, whose founders had been well versed in the practice of assassination, as in the killing of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948, from the earliest days. In fact, within weeks of Bush unleashing the CIA’s counterterrorists, Israel was already moving ahead, at least in the art of euphemism. For many years the preferred Hebrew term for assassination had been
Hisul Memukad
, meaning “targeted extermination.” But in November 2011 Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein decreed that that term “wrongs” Israel and mandated substitution of the phrase
Sikul Memukad,
meaning “targeted prevention,” which duly became both the official and popular term.

In 2005, Avi Dicter, the retiring head of Israel’s internal security service, Shabak, was asked, “Do you have a problem with a state becoming an executioner?”

“No,” he replied. “I’m telling you, foreign delegations come here on a weekly basis to learn from us, not just the Americans. It has become the sexiest trend in counterterrorism. Its effectiveness is amazing … the state of Israel has turned targeted preventions into an art form.” Dicter’s philosophy, as explained by another Israeli intelligence chief, was that “all the time we have to mow the grass—all the time—and the leaders with experience will die and the others will be without experience and finally the ‘barrel of terror’ [a Dicter analogy] will be drained.”

“If you do something for long enough,” later observed Colonel (Res.) Daniel Reisner, former head of the IDF’s Legal Department, “the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.… International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassinations thesis and we had to push it. [Now] it is in the center of the bounds of legality.”

Immediately following his retirement, Dicter spent several months as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where he coauthored “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists and Their Implications for the United States.” The paper reiterated his “barrel of terror” thesis, stating as a first principle that “the number of effective terrorists is limited,” thereby rendering their elimination especially productive.

His argument found fertile ground. Discussing the post-9/11 U.S. assassination timeline, a former senior White House counterterrorism official drew my attention, unprompted, to the influential role played by both the kingpin strategists and the Israelis. “The idea had its origins in the drug war. So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking,” he explained. “In addition, the success of the Israeli targeted-killing strategy was a major influence on us, particularly in the Agency and in Special Ops. We had a high degree of confidence in the utility of targeted killing. There was a strong sense that this was a tool to be used.” Echoing Dicter’s notion that the enemy has only a limited number of effective leaders, he noted that by targeting the “seconds in command, you force the organization to put up its third string, and so you get a steady decline in quality.”

So, within a few short weeks of 9/11, the newly emboldened assassination machine began to crank into action, firing the first shot in a war that may never end. It missed.

7

LEGALLY BLIND

On the night of October 7, 2001, the U.S. military and intelligence high command at the Pentagon, CIA, and various headquarters across the globe were gazing attentively at the video screens that had lately become such a prominent feature of their offices. The recent collapse of the dot-com boom meant that a huge amount of commercial satellite bandwidth capacity had become available for use by the military to transmit all the exciting video streamed by drones to an ever-wider audience. They were watching a grainy infrared video relayed from a Predator drone armed with two Hellfire missiles over the outskirts of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. The drone “pilot” was sitting in a trailer in a parking lot at CIA headquarters in Langley, although CIA drones in the war zone were under military control. The silent picture showed three vehicles and a motorcycle leaving a mud-walled compound and heading toward Kandahar.

Among the far-flung spectators was General Tommy Franks, the four-star general commanding the assault on Afghanistan from his wartime headquarters in Tampa, Florida. “I felt a familiar rush of adrenaline,” Franks wrote later, for the spectacle took him back to long-ago days watching battles from a helicopter in Vietnam. “This target has all the characteristics of a leadership convoy,” reported a CIA counterterrorism officer who was watching from the trailer, a former day-care center, in the Langley parking lot. “This could be Mullah Omar’s personal vehicle.” Mullah Omar was the Taliban leader, a very high-value target. Here was a chance to eliminate the heart of the enemy war machine at a blow.