Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (41 page)

As originally written: Melvin Goodman,
National Insecurity
(San Francisco, City Lights Books, 2013), p. 31.

“We must provide the resources”: Dan Morgan, “House Approves $289 Billion for Defense in 367 to 58 Vote,”
Washington Post
, July 20, 2000.

In 2005 Lewis took command of the full appropriations committee and in 2006 was nominated: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, “Beyond Delay, The 20 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and Five to Watch),” Washington, DC, 2006, p. 67.
http://www.crewsmostcorrupt.org/mostcorrupt/entry/most-corrupt-2006
.

“The chairman [Lewis] is too modest”: Hearing of the Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee on U.S. Army Posture and Acquisition Programs, March 12, 2003.

Thus it was that Lewis, in his capacity as vice chairman: Whittle, op. cit., p. 11.

The three-month war on behalf of the insurgency: “Fellow Military Leaders May Prove to be Clark’s Toughest Hurdle,”
InsideDefense.com
, September 13, 2003.

Also hit were businesses belonging to President Milo
š
evi
ć
’s friends: Julian H. Tolbert, Major, USAF, “Crony Attack Strategic Attack’s Silver Bullet?” Thesis presented to the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, Air University Press, November 2006.

As Deptula, by now a brigadier general: Abe Jackson, “America’s Airman, David Deptula and the Airpower Moment,” School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Air University Press, June 2011.

As General Michael Jackson, commander of the British contingent, said afterward: Andrew Gilligan, “‘Russia, Not Bombs, Brought End to War in Kosovo’ Says Jackson,”
Daily Telegraph,
August 1, 1999.

Nevertheless General Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: John Barry, “The Kosovo Cover-up,”
Newsweek
, May 15, 2000.

As U.S. Army Colonel Douglas MacGregor: Email to author, April 14, 2012.

They had put dummy tanks on display: Associated Press, “NATO Attack on Yugoslavia Gave Iraq Good Lessons,”
Toronto Globe and Mail
, November 20, 2002.

Richard Armitage … wrote the speech: Eric Schmidt, “A Longtime Friend of Powell’s Is Tapped to Be His Deputy,”
New York Times
, February 13, 2001.

“Our forces in the next century must be agile, lethal, readily deployable”: George W. Bush, “A Period of Consequences,” Speech delivered at The Citadel, Charleston, SC, September 23, 1999.
http://www3.citadel.edu/pao/addresses/pres_bush.html
.

So Slobodan Milo
š
evi
ć
’s personal residence was duly destroyed: BBC News, “Milosevic House Destroyed by NATO,” April 22, 1999.

As one officer told a reporter: James W. Canan, “Seeing More, and Risking Less, with UAVs,”
Aerospace America,
Aerospace Industries Association, Washington, DC, October 1999, p. 26.

Jumper himself excitedly reported to Congress: General John Jumper, Testimony to House Armed Services Military Readiness Subcommittee, October 26, 1999.

Apart from that one incident hailed by Jumper: Interview with James G. “Snake” Clark, Director, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Innovation, Deputy Chief of Staff for ISR, U.S. Air Force Headquarters, Washington, DC, October 13, 2013.

In a significant step along the road to remotely controlling the battle: Department of Defense, Report to Congress, “Kosovo/Operation Allied Force After-Action Report,” January 2000, p. 124.

Meanwhile, thanks to the same expansion in communications bandwidth: Ibid., p. 26.

The general and his micromanaging habits: Interview with former senior U.S. Air Force officer, Washington, DC, February 2013.

Even as the smoke of the Balkan battlefields cleared: Interview with Tom Christie, Washington, DC, May 8, 2013.

The tests, carried out over nine days: Director, Operational Test & Evaluation, “Report on the Predator Medium Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle,” Department of Defense, Washington, DC, October 3, 2001.

Overall, Predator could find less than a third of its targets: Ibid., p. 20.

National Imagery Interpretation Rating Scale: Ibid., p. 3.

29 percent: Ibid., p. 20.

The infrared camera: Ibid., p. 18.

One or another component: Ibid., p. 40.

In Vietnam, troops fighting on the ground: Harrison, op. cit., p. 109.

“The air force had had this idea…”: Interview, Pentagon official, Washington, DC, April 19, 2013.

Just as the muddy pictures from Kosovo: Interview with “Snake” Clark, op. cit.

Yet, the closer one looks at those pictures: “Missed Opportunities,”
NBC Nightly News
, March 17, 2004.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4540958/ns/nbc_nightly_news_with_brian_williams/t/osama-bin-laden-missed-opportunities/#.Uf7BSmR-xU4
.

As George Tenet later told the 9/11 commission: “CIA Director Says Terrorist Threat Warnings Made in 1997; Tenet Says His Warnings, Intelligence Reports Heard,” U.S. State Department, Washington File, March 24, 2004.

The cover letter of Christie’s report: Accessible at pogoarchives.org/m/dp/dp-predator.pdf.

Three years later she would be sentenced: Leslie Wayne, “Ex-Pentagon Official Gets 9 Months for Conspiring to Favor Boeing,”
New York Times
, October 2, 2004.

“What the fuck is this?”: Interview with Tom Christie, Washington, DC, May 8, 2013.

In December 2001, President Bush returned to the Citadel: “President Bush Addresses the Corps,” Speech delivered at The Citadel, Charleston, SC, December 11, 2001.
http://www3.citadel.edu/pao/addresses/presbush01.html
.

5 | It’s Not Assassination If We Do It

“As long as Hitler continues”: Dennis Rigden,
Kill the Fuhrer: Section X and Operation Foxley
(Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 1999), Kindle ed., 2011, location 1196.

Although Heydrich, one of the cruelest of the Nazi bosses, did die from wounds: Robert Gerwarth,
Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 280–87.

“grave divergence of views”: Rigden, op. cit., location 1287.

“It would be disastrous if the world…”: Rigden, op. cit., location 1170.

In any event, SOE was in reality a surprisingly ineffective operation: Jean Overton Fuller,
The German Penetration of SOE: France 1941–44
(London, UK: William Kimber, 1975), passim.

The biographer of OSS Director William Donovan summarized: Anthony Cave-Brown,
William Donovan, The Last Hero
(New York: Times Books, 1982), p. 236.

Sadly, the intelligence turned out to be entirely bogus: Cave-Brown, op. cit., p. 701.

Clarke’s colorful style and views: Forrest Pogue, interview with Carter Clarke, July 6, 1959, tape 99. Transcript kindly supplied by the George C. Marshall Foundation, 1600 VMI Parade, Lexington, VA.

So McCormack was asked to come down from New York: Memorandum by McCormack to Clarke on problems, origins, and functions of the Special Branch M.I.S., April 15, 1943, Records of the National Security Agency, National Archives Record Group 457.

Thus in 1944 Clarke was dispatched: “Carter W. Clarke Dies at 90; An Army Intelligence Officer,”
New York Times
, September 7, 1987.

Dewey had learned of this: Telephone interview with Carter Clarke, September 1983.

American commanders saw an opportunity for revenge: Don Davis,
Lightning Strike, The Secret Mission to Kill Admiral Yamamoto and Avenge Pearl Harbor
(New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006), pp. 53, 232.

“I remember when we got the news of Hiroshima”: Interview with Edward Huddleston, San Francisco, December 1984.

Donovan and others assumed that the leaker: Jennet Conant, “Swashbuckling Spymaster,”
New York Times
, February 11, 2011.

Even when the agency did take a successful technical intelligence initiative: Dino Brugioni,
Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA, and Cold War Aerial Espionage
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010), p. 101.

Even more secretly, and dangerously: Fred Kaplan,
Wizards of Armageddon
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 134.

“following in the footsteps of the OSS”: Tim Weiner,
Legacy of Ashes
(New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 55.

Yet in both cases, as one historian: Ibid., p. 80.

Starting in 1952, according to internal agency documents: Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh, eds., “CIA and Assassination, The Guatemala Documents,” The National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, no. 4, doc. 1.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/
.

To aid in training the specialists: Ibid., doc. 2.

On the other hand, human rights groups estimate: Ibid., introduction.

According to Castro’s longtime bodyguard: Duncan Campbell, “638 Ways to Kill Castro,”
The Guardian
, August 3, 2006.

As Richard Bissell, the CIA’s deputy director for plans later testified: Weiner, op. cit., p. 215.

“I want him destroyed, don’t you understand?”: Stephen Dorrill,
MI6, Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service
(New York: The Free Press, 2002), p. 613.

In Laos, for example: Leslie and
Andrew Cockburn
, producers, “Guns, Drugs and the CIA,” PBS
Frontline
, WGBH Boston, transmitted May 17, 1988.

“So I sent them a head-count”: Interview with Tony Po, Udorn Thani, Thailand, November 1987.

Officially termed the Viet Cong Infrastructure Information System: Doug Valentine,
The Phoenix Program
(Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2000), p. 258.

Before long the list had grown to 6,000: William Rousseau and Austin Long,
The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency
(Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corp., 2009), p. 9.

In August of the following year, Robert “Blowtorch” Komer: Valentine, op. cit., p. 250.

“Sure we got involved in assassinations”: Valentine, op. cit., p. 311.

Thus in 1969 the
New York Times
: Terence Smith, “C.I.A.-Planned Drive on Officials of Vietcong Is Said to Be Failing; U.S. Sources Say Suspects Are Often Freed by Local Vietnamese Authorities,”
New York Times,
August 19, 1969.

By 1971 euphemism had been cast aside: Felix Belair Jr., “U.S. Aide Defends Pacification Program in Vietnam Despite Killings of Civilians,”
New York Times,
July 20, 1971.

“a program for the assassination of civilian leaders”: Valentine, op. cit., p. 321.

Alternatively, the program met with wholehearted approval: Mark Moyar,
Phoenix and the Birds of Prey, Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam
(Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1997), p. 167.

Though large numbers of people were indeed being killed: Nick Turse,
Kill Anything That Moves
(New York: Henry Holt, 2013), p. 190.

As he told author Nick Turse: Ibid., p. 190.

Unsurprisingly, it was well penetrated: Sam Adams,
War of Numbers
(Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 1994), pp. 178–79.

Vincent Okamoto, later a distinguished Los Angeles Superior Court Judge: Christian Appy,
Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides
(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 321.

In 2004, for example, David Kilcullen: David Kilcullen, “Countering Global Insurgency,”
Small Wars Journal
, November 30, 2004.
smallwarsjournal.com/documents/kilcullen.pdf
.

“Sam, this may sound strange…”: Adams, op. cit., p. 168.

The ban, first pronounced by President Gerald Ford: President Gerald R. Ford’s Executive Order 11905: United States Foreign Intelligence Activities, February 18, 1976.
http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/speeches/760110e.asp#SEC
. 5.

Administration officials later explained to the
Washington Post
: “Covert Hit Teams Might Evade Presidential Ban,”
Washington Post
, February 12, 1984.

So, in 1986, President Reagan sent a fleet of F-111 bombers: Seymour Hersh, “Target Qaddafi,”
New York Times,
February 22, 1987.

W. Hays Parks, a military lawyer working for the army’s judge advocate general: W. Hays Parks, Memorandum on Executive Order 12333 and Assassination, Department of the Army, Office of the Judge Advocate General, November 2, 1989. Posted by John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/Use%20of%20Force/October%202002/Parks_final.pdf
.

As Parks later explained to me: Telephone interview, January 25, 2014.

According to an authoritative account of the affair: Seymour Hersh, “Target Gaddafi,” op. cit.

6 | Kingpins and Maniacs

“That was a good time”: Interview with Rex Rivolo, Chantilly, VA, December 19, 2013.

By the late 1980s, Rivolo, always enthusiastic about a new project: Jim Detjen, “Mapmaker Hopes to Chart Milky Way Star System,”
Miami Herald,
November 19, 1988.

Early on, he concluded that the V-22 was dangerously unstable: Interview with Barry Crane, Williamsburg, VA, December 18, 2013.

In 1993 the Clinton administration awarded the post to Brian Sheridan: Vanessa Mizell, “New at the Top: Brian Sheridan’s Interest in International Security Started Early in Life,”
Washington Post
, February 13, 2011.

The ultimate solution appeared simple and obvious: Edward J. Epstein,
Agency of Fear
(London, UK: Verso, 1990), p. 144.

Among these major traffickers: Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, “On the Trail of Medellín’s Drug Lord,”
Vanity Fair
, December 1992.

At one point there were seventeen of these surveillance aircraft simultaneously in the air: Mark Bowden,
Killing Pablo
(New York: Penguin, 2002), p. 154.