Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (36 page)

Ironically, after years of experience in managing a remote-killing campaign that depended on questionable intelligence, involved allies who were themselves in an equivocal relationship with the targets, and caused extensive collateral damage while traumatizing an entire society, Washington moved to duplicate the effort elsewhere.

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The November 3, 2002, killing of Qa’id Salim Sinan al-Harithi, a leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen (and one of the reputed masterminds of the attack on the USS
Cole
), in Marib, a district about a hundred miles east of Yemen’s capital Sana’a, by a drone-fired missile was notable on several accounts. It was the first assassination by drone in a country with which the United States was not at war (unlike the Afghan hits). In those more innocent days this was cause for shock to many people, including Asma Jahangir, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, who thought the development “truly disturbing.” Officially, the killing was entirely the work of the Yemeni government, but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz bragged on CNN about a “very successful tactical operation” by the CIA. The strike also broke new ground, in that it was the first remote-control summary execution without trial of an American citizen. Kamal Derwish, from Buffalo, New York, Harithi’s assistant, was riding in the car with him when the missile hit. In addition, coming a year and a half before the CIA obliged the Pakistanis by killing Nek Muhammed Wazir, it may also have been the first time a drone strike was put in service of local political machinations.

According to a cable later published by Wikileaks, Edmund Hull, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, told a visiting human rights delegation that “the action was taken in full cooperation with the ROYG [Republic of Yemen Government], against known al-Qaida operatives after previous attempts to apprehend the terrorists left eighteen Yemenis dead.” That statement was true as far as it went, and Ambassador Hull may have sincerely believed that the Yemeni government had suffered heavy casualties while making a good-faith effort to arrest Harethi. But Yemenis versed in the labyrinthine and devious politics of their country knew better.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s cunning and corrupt dictator since 1978, had long had an alliance of convenience with Yemeni Jihadis, a group nurtured by the Saudis and the CIA in the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s. They had provided crucial support for his crushing of South Yemeni independence in 1994, and remained an important if unacknowledged element of his ruling coalition, enjoying support and funds from Saudi Arabia. For example, Majeed al-Zindani, an extremist Yemeni cleric who had been Osama bin Laden’s spiritual mentor and who exercised enormous influence in Yemen, including but not limited to supervision of the Yemeni school syllabus, had long enjoyed Saleh’s favor and protection. (He has also laid claims to some striking scientific breakthroughs, including the discovery of cures for hepatitis and AIDS using “natural herbal compounds.”) Though placed on the State Department’s list of Designated Global Terrorists in 2004, Zindani lived openly in Sana’a as head of Imam University, which was founded with Yemeni government and Saudi financial support. Imam U. was the alma mater of, among others, the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. Anwar al-Awlaki, the Islamist cleric destined to be the second American citizen killed by a drone, was also on its faculty for a period. Zindani was a cofounder of the Islah party, the Islamist group headed by the tribal leader Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, the second most powerful man in the country. These allies, and others of like mind, were key, in Saleh’s view, to maintaining his grip on power and fending off the threat of secession by South Yemen, an independent Marxist state until 1990.

On the other hand, it was also important for Saleh to retain the support of Washington, which was anxious to see the al-Qaeda members in Yemen either in their graves or at least under lock and key. Saleh’s challenge therefore was to cooperate with the United States while avoiding any serious confrontation with al-Qaeda and thus remain in power and enlarge his already colossal fortune. (According to an eyewitness, Saleh, who was distrustful of banks, kept a large portion of his money in cash—hundreds of millions of dollars—stacked on pallets secreted in the basement of his palace.) When he had first seized power in a 1978 coup that followed several other short-lived coups, the expatriate community in Sana’a had held a sweepstake on how long he would last. The winning ticket had been “at least six weeks.” Saleh’s endurance was a tribute to his unscrupulous mastery of Yemeni tribal politics in all their infinite complexity.

On December 18, 2001, a force of Yemeni soldiers approached al-Hosun, a village in Marib Province, the reputed lair of al-Harithi, the al-Qaeda leader. But before they got anywhere near their target, the troops came under a hail of gunfire. Eighteen were killed and several wounded, the rest being surrounded and effectively held hostage until negotiations with local tribal sheikhs secured their release. Well-informed political sources in Sana’a told me on several occasions that there was more to the story than that, as is usually the case in Yemen. “Neither the military expedition nor the claim that they could not get al-Harithi can be taken at face value,” I was told. “Saleh dispatched the military mission to al-Huson, and Shaykh al-Ahmar (Saleh’s ally) sent his men to ambush the soldiers. When the soldiers got to al-Huson, they met no resistance at all. As they exited the town, there was a massive attack from the sand dunes just outside.” Thus, by this account, Saleh could convincingly demonstrate to Washington that the wanted terrorists, despite his tireless efforts, were well out of his reach.

Following the successful al-Harithi strike, the skies of Yemen were quiet for several years. From Saleh’s point of view they became perhaps a little too quiet, as a lull in al-Qaeda activity led to a cut in U.S. aid and irksome lectures from visiting officials about democracy and human rights. However, a reinvigoration of the jihadi group following a spectacular jailbreak in 2006 soon led to renewed attention and aid from Washington. Everyone in Sana’a assumed the escape had high-level clearance, part of Saleh’s ongoing policy of making himself necessary to the United States while not directly antagonizing al-Qaeda. “They were supposed to have used forks to dig through sixty-centimeter-thick reinforced concrete,” joked one local to me. “Imagine what they could have done with knives!” Nevertheless, with the unveiling of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a merger of Yemeni and Saudi groups in January 2009, Yemen attained the status of a terrorist hotbed with consequent prominence on the Washington radar screen. Ruled by a kleptocracy, mired in poverty, weak, and unimportant enough to be everybody’s plaything, Yemenis were about to experience the full weight of twenty-first-century U.S. counterterrorism. Adding to their woes was the fact that manhunting rights in their country would be shared by two U.S. targeted-killing agencies, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. While JSOC flew its drones out of the leased French base in Djibouti, across the Red Sea, the CIA built a special base in Saudi Arabia, close by the Yemeni border.

As drone strikes by one or the other of these agencies ramped up, from two in 2009 to four in 2010, ten in 2011, to forty-one in 2012, ordinary Yemenis would experience a lesson in drone warfare all too often lost on far-off officials who authorize the killings: though it may appear that drones offer a remote, sanitized mode of warfare, to their victims they are very much a local affair, a fact that was forcefully impressed on Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Marib Province, in May 2010.

Given the closely woven texture of Yemeni family and tribal connections, it should have come as no surprise that al-Shabwani was a cousin of Ayed al-Shabwani, a prominent local al-Qaeda leader. Jaber was also a business partner of a Saleh relative who held a very important position in the security services and with whom he was now in dispute over a matter of $9 million owed him by the Saleh relative. On May 24, Jaber al-Shabwani, accompanied by his uncle, two of his sons, and several bodyguards, went to meet his cousin in hopes of getting him to lay down his arms. A few minutes into the meeting came the distant but unmistakable sound of a drone, whereupon the al-Qaeda Shabwani made a rapid departure. The deputy governor stayed put on the reasonable but mistaken assumption that no one would want to target him. He was wrong. The exploding missile, most likely targeted at his cell phone, killed him, his uncle, and two of his bodyguards, and injured his sons. In Washington, the realization dawned that someone (in this case, the Joint Special Operations Command) had fed the targeters very incorrect information that, according to one report, “may have been intended to result in Mr. Shabwani’s death.” Obama gave his influential adviser, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, a “chest thumping,” by the latter’s account, angrily asking, “How could this happen?” Brennan, meanwhile, was “pissed,” and demanding to know why a deputy governor was meeting with al-Qaeda. If anyone in Washington knew about the $9 million, they kept it to themselves.

This mistargeted killing had more far-reaching consequences than most, since Shabwani’s father, Sheikh Ali al-Shabwani, led members of his tribe in blowing up a section of the vital trans-Yemen oil pipeline in retaliation, leading to millions of dollars in lost revenue for the treasury. Chastened, Washington suspended drone operations in Yemen for a year. Supposedly, when operations resumed, the CIA was playing a greater role and strikes were no longer quite so reliant on Saleh and his cronies for targeting intelligence. But Yemenis may not have noticed the difference, since people were still picked off either in error or as collateral damage. In many cases, security forces could easily have arrested the victims instead of having them summarily incinerated by Hellfire.

Anwar al-Awlaki, for example, billed for a time as “the most dangerous man in the world,” was publicly nominated to the CIA’s kill list in April 2011. Awlaki had already retreated to the heartland of his tribe, the Awalik. It was easy to believe that the fugitive was hidden in the desert fastness, but in fact, as
Guardian
reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad discovered when he visited the tribe’s ruling Sultan, although everyone in the neighborhood knew where the notorious preacher was living, no one seemed interested in arresting him. “The government haven’t asked us to hand him in,” Sultan Fareed bin Babaker told the reporter. “If they do then we will think about it. But no one has asked us.”

A few weeks before this conversation took place, a pair of Justice Department lawyers in Washington had obligingly provided the Obama administration with a secret legal justification for summarily executing Awlaki, accepting as a premise that he posed an “imminent” threat and that his capture was “infeasible.” The July 16, 2010, memorandum, which the
New York Times
later described as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories … clearly tailored to the desired result,” invoked, among other precedents, a 2006 Israeli court decision on targeted killing. The Israeli Supreme Court did indeed rule in December 2006 that “targeted preventions” would be legal in certain cases, when absolutely necessary to prevent a “ticking bomb” scenario but not otherwise. However, as revealed by Anat Kamm, an Israeli whistle-blower who copied documents while serving in the IDF, the Israeli military routinely disregarded the judgment when making targeting decisions. Kamm was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for her action.

Awlaki was finally killed by a CIA drone in September 2011 and his son, Abdul Rahman, by a JSOC drone two weeks later. The boy died because he and seven others happened to be having dinner at a restaurant where a high-value al-Qaeda target, Ibrahim al-Banna, was thought to be eating, it evidently being the targeters’ assumption that any fellow diners were guilty by culinary association.

Anwar al-Awlaki had been a prime target thanks to his connection to two failed attempts to explode bombs on American planes, not to mention his mentoring of Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist accused of killing thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009. But although the direct threat to “the homeland” apparently receded with his elimination, the pace of U.S. attacks on Yemeni targets only increased. In 2011, President Saleh, faced with massive protests against his misrule, withdrew his forces from the southern province of Abyan, a center of southern separatism in which al-Qaeda had gained a strong foothold. To those who knew him, this was a typical Saleh ploy. As Abdul Ghani al-Iryani, a well-known political analyst in Sana’a, stated flatly at the time: “The regime decided to hand over this territory to [al-Qaeda] to underline the risk of terrorism in the eyes of the west. That didn’t really work, except that it created a very dangerous situation for the population. So, the regime hands over the land, the territory, to the extremists and then starts bombing them with all kinds of weapons.” The hapless inhabitants of this miserably poor enclave found themselves lumped in with al-Qaeda under a rain of bombs and Hellfire missiles unleashed by the United States but for which the Yemeni government, corrupt, repressive, hated, was happy to take responsibility.

Saleh’s Abyan ploy did not save his presidency, although he did get to keep all that neatly stacked cash in the basement. His replacement, Abd Rubbah Mansour Hadi, continued many of the same policies, including, at least for a while, wholehearted endorsement of the drone strikes. Many of those being hunted were no doubt al-Qaeda officials in good standing, even if their international impact was limited, but the targeting of people who could easily have been arrested persisted. Al-Qaeda member Hamid al-Radmi, for example, was incinerated in his car in central Yemen in April 2013 by three missiles even though he was in frequent contact with security and political officials as a mediator. Adnan al-Qadhi, a colonel in an elite army unit who was clearly sympathetic to al-Qaeda, was killed although he lived and moved openly in a village on the edge of Sana’a that was home to many of the country’s ruling elite. “They could have picked him up any time, but he was a relative of Ali Mohsen [a very important commander]. It would have been too embarrassing to arrest a relative,” one Sanani explained to me, “so Ali Mohsen said ‘let the Americans kill him.’”