Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (37 page)

Inevitably, collateral victims accumulated; the driver and his cousin whose taxi passengers were two targeted al-Qaeda members or the twelve passengers in a minibus, including three children and a pregnant woman, on their way home from market in the central highland town of Rada’a in September 2012, burned so badly their bodies were unrecognizable, or the anti–al-Qaeda preacher, Salim bin Ali Jaber, killed in August 2012 along with his cousin, village policeman Walid bin Ali Jaber, while arguing with three targeted suspects. “If Salim and Walid are al-Qaeda,” chanted infuriated villagers as they marched through the village four days after the strike, “then we are all al-Qaeda.”

The villagers also chanted, “Obama, this is wrong,” a point with which the president should have agreed, at least after May 23, 2013, when the White House issued “U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.” This document stated clearly and unequivocally: “[L]ethal force will be used only to prevent or stop attacks on U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible.” Moreover, “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” and only when there was a “near certainty that non-combatants will not be killed or injured.”

It all depended on what was meant by “imminent.” Over fifteen days in the summer of 2013 the United States hit Yemen with nine strikes, killing as many as forty-nine people, including up to seven civilians, three of whom were children. Officials told the
New York Times
that intelligence of a possible terrorist threat (in the form of an intercepted dispatch from al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri instructing his lieutenant in Yemen, Nasir al Wuhayshi, to “do something”) had “expanded the scope of people we could go after” and that none of those killed in the stepped-up strikes were “household names.” Rather, they were “rising stars” who could become future leaders. An unnamed official was quoted as explaining: “Before, we couldn’t necessarily go after a driver for the organization; it’d have to be an operations director. Now that driver becomes fair game because he’s providing direct support to the plot.”

Clearly, things had come a very long way since George Bush had begun crossing out names in the list he kept in his desk drawer. A well-funded bureaucratic mechanism to service the “disposition matrix,” as the kill list had been euphemistically relabeled, was centered at the National Counterterrorism Center, whose 500-strong staff was charged with, among other things, collating the various lists crafted by the CIA and JSOC and others. (As noted, the president liked to have the very last word. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” he remarked the day Awlaki died. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”) John Brennan, who moved from the White House to take formal command of the CIA in 2013, was credited with having overseen the crafting of this elaborate and complex system, a monument to the principle of “precise precision” while nominating people far away for execution. In reality, this arrangement illustrated how faithfully twenty-first-century assassination practices followed the hoary traditions of strategic bombing, in which “targeting committees” had long labored to discern “critical nodes,” remorselessly expanding target lists in the process.

In April 2014, Western media took notice of an al-Qaeda rally—a party to welcome twenty-nine fellow jihadis who had broken out of jail in Sana’a in February—that had taken place somewhere in Yemen the month before. As shown in an al-Qaeda video, many hundreds of armed, chanting, cheerful-looking fighters paraded through a canyon and stood in long lines to greet a smiling Nasir al-Wuhayshi. No one appeared concerned that they might be under surveillance by the “unblinking eye.” Coincidentally or not, this striking demonstration of jihadi insouciance was immediately followed, once the video reached a wider audience, by multiple drone strikes in several southern provinces. As many as sixty-five people, including at least three children, died over three days.

Despite the intensity of the attacks, no one in authority was able to name a single one of the victims, nor were there any official leaks or even hints that the attacks were aimed at foiling any threat, imminent or otherwise, to “U.S. persons.” The White House off-loaded the chore of commenting on the strikes to the Yemeni government, which duly followed orders in claiming responsibility. Reports from Sana’a indicated that the Yemeni regime had been hoping to persuade the United States to limit the strikes that provided al-Qaeda with such an effective recruiting tool, but such pleas from a feeble client regime could easily be brushed aside.

In any event, there were fresh opportunities beckoning for drone warfare, not just traditional operations in benighted regions of the third world, such as North Africa, but against more formidable enemies. This in turn offered new challenges and the alluring prospect of enhanced budgets.

13

ONE BIG ROBOT

“We want to be everywhere, know everything, and we want to predict what happens next,” declared an earnest Lieutenant General Joseph Votel, commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in April 2014. Twenty years after promoters of the revolution in military affairs first promised a world of networked and omniscient precision, the dream lived on. Votel was addressing “GeoInt,” the well-funded annual Florida jamboree that brings together surveillance-industry executives with their intelligence agency customers for a week of mutually profitable confabulation. The general’s words drew respectful attention, for the night-raiding JSOC was one of the few entities relatively secure from the famine eating into budgets and revenues across the U.S. defense establishment. While most public defense forums echoed with lamentations of the “painful choices” engendered by the legally mandated cuts in defense spending known as sequestration, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), of which JSOC is a key and especially secretive component, had seen its upwardly curving budget survive almost undisturbed.

Incoming Obama administration officials inspecting the national security system bequeathed them by the Bush-Cheney team in 2009 told me at the time that “Special Operations are out of control,” and the intervening years had done little to change the picture. Operating in at least 134 countries, empowered to kill people without recourse to higher authority, endowed with “unique acquisition authority” to spend money with a minimum of congressional oversight, the “point of the spear,” as the special operators liked to refer to themselves, had grown from a 1980 force of 11,600 specialists focused on strengthening third world allies into 2013’s 66,000-person machine. From a mere $2.3 billion in 2001, the command, which extracts its budget directly from Congress, had garnered $9.3 billion in 2008, $10.3 billion in 2011, and was looking for $9.9 billion in 2015, the slight decline due to the drawdown of Afghan war operations. Such generosity to the heavily publicized “secret” warriors that had cut down bin Laden, Zarqawi, and others had endowed SOCOM with a prosperous sheen. Streams of congressional delegations invited to visit the headquarters in Tampa, Florida, marveled at the gleaming modern buildings and lavish accoutrements. “They have professional lighting engineers for the displays they put on to show us what they are doing around the world,” one awestruck house staffer told me on his return.

Unquestioning largesse had generated the inevitable result. “When SEAL Team 6 operators are sent on ‘training’ missions to Alaska to go hunting on the government’s dime, you know you have budgets that are both too fat and lack oversight,” one member of the elite force told a reporter. “If [SOCOM Commander Admiral William] McRaven is concerned with his budget, he should start with fighting the wartime tradition of fiscal abuse that has gone unchecked since 9/11 in the SOF community. Our love affair with special operations has caused the DOD to turn a blind eye on very questionable fiscal practices.” Nevertheless, there was little sign that the high-tech assassins were falling out of favor, though Congress did raise some questions about a scheme for a “National Capital Region Headquarters” with a $10 million annual budget as well as an $80 million project, championed by McRaven, to develop an “Iron Man” battle suit for the commandos. TALOS, the battery-powered “tactical-assault light operator suit,” featured full-body bulletproof protection as well as muscle-boosting components, embedded computers, night vision, and video sensors for “increased situational awareness” (with a slick, expensive, gamelike video to promote the project). Among other items on a Special Operations wish list for Advancement of Technologies in Equipment for Use by U.S. Special Operations Forces issued shortly after Votel’s address, was a “Concealable/Take Down Urban Sniper Rifle” folded into a small 12-by-20-inch suitcase, guided bullets, and tiny missiles as well as “neutraceutical and/or pharmacological enhancements to increase neuroperformance.”

Another McRaven initiative, that of building a $15 million “regional SOF coordination center” in Colombia, ran into concerted opposition from the other services, who complained to Congress. Special Operations has been heavily engaged in Colombia since the Clinton era in combating the venerable FARC Marxist guerrilla insurgency. In recent years this campaign has been promoted as
the
textbook example of high-value targeting powered by precise electronic intelligence, a strategy that had clearly failed in Afghanistan but was hailed as having enjoyed great success in Colombia.

Conducted in conjunction with the CIA, the ongoing operation followed the traditional pattern of the recent Asian wars. Targeted leaders of FARC were tracked by NSA via their cell phones or covertly planted tracking devices. Once located, they were struck, not by drone-fired missiles but by 500-pound GPS-guided bombs dropped from Vietnam-era light A-37 bombers provided to Colombia by the United States. According to American and Colombian officials who briefed the
Washington Post
on their success, the campaign eliminated at least two dozen high-value rebel leaders, causing “mass desertions” and “chaos and dysfunction” within the organization. Such results would seem to validate the whole concept of high-value-people targeting and indeed are celebrated as such by JSOC and the CIA.

But the reality was a little different. True to form, almost all the dead leaders were speedily replaced, often by younger, more able, or more brutal men. Mono Jojoy, for example, an aging senior leader who had risen through the ranks, was killed in September 2010; the Colombian president hailed his death as the “hardest blow” ever suffered by the rebel group. Yet he was almost immediately replaced by “El Médico,” Alberto Parra, an able younger leader who was an educated and astute doctor. Other high-level hits, except those in regions, such as the Caribbean coast, where FARC had already been shredded by government-sponsored paramilitary death squads, had produced the same result. Paul Reyes, a senior leader killed in a cross-border operation in 2008, was similarly replaced, in three days, by another experienced commander, a former university professor with the nom de guerre Joaquín Gómez. “You can see that their command and control stayed intact,” Adam Isacson, a specialist on the topic at the Washington Office on Latin America, pointed out to me. “They’ve had two ceasefires in recent years and made them stick; if command had broken down you’d have had groups going rogue and that didn’t happen.” In May 2014, in seeming rejection of long-standing U.S. policy, the Colombian government announced it had agreed in peace talks with FARC to work together in combating the cocaine trade, an initiative endorsed by the electorate with the re-election of President Santos the following month.

Notwithstanding the claimed victory in Colombia and the glamour associated with the Special Operations “brand,” opinion polls have for years suggested that a majority of Americans firmly believe the United States should be “less active” in world affairs. Nevertheless, in 2014 Votel stressed that he still saw his mission as global: “Since we can no longer draw a box on a map and say that’s where the problem is, we must be everywhere, in the sense that we must be able to find the threat anywhere on the planet.”

A decade or so earlier, he might have lapsed into the acronym-laden jargon associated with effects-based operations, but now JSOC’s youthful-looking three-star general, who would shortly be nominated to a fourth star and to succeed McRaven as overall head of Special Operations Command, contented himself with the simple desire, expressed with a straight face, to “know everything.” Pursuit of this goal would require “wide area persistent surveillance” and “precision geolocation.” The former was a reference to a system that might live up to the undelivered promises of Gorgon Stare, Sierra Nevada’s attempt to monitor entire cities with one sensor, while the latter referred to a computerized version of the phone-tracking IMSI Catcher that had mistakenly drawn the missiles down on Zabet Amanullah in the middle of his election campaign tour. Along with a desire to “see through clouds,” Votel also expressed the need to “bring the data from all disciplines of intelligence together in near real time so that we can know everything.”