The New Spymasters (35 page)

Everything about the Death Star approach was based on intelligence, but it also depended on speed. One key person involved said, ‘With targeted killings you either defeat or you shape the enemy … If you get the tempo high enough then it's difficult for them to come up for air. It's like hitting a boxer with body blows; it's not a knockout but you stop them from breathing; you're keeping them off-balance.'
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This was war by raiding, and the tempo was maintained, not so much by kill operations like the one against Amanullah in Takhar, but by Special Forces ground raids at night to kill or capture prisoners. If the target surrendered, he would be taken back for interrogation and, even if he did not, his home would be searched for every type of material. Intelligence pulled together on one night could be used to launch another raid on the next. The soldiers looked not only for bigger items like laptops but also for ‘pocket litter'. This meant phones, SIM cards, notebooks, scraps of paper, anything that gave clues about the target's network – who he was connected to. The McChrystal approach was all about tracing connections, using every available piece of information to move rapidly from one target to another. According to someone involved, ‘We have had decades of manhunting. We hunt individuals, but what's changed is we have started to target entire networks.'

The biggest source of HUMINT for the manhunt was prisoners. With the help of interpreters, JSOC got night-and-day access to question the enemy in jail cells close to their headquarters. The US asserted the right to run its own military prisons and only hand over prisoners to the Afghan authorities after their thorough debriefing. One visitor to the Death Star described hearing a live audio feed from an interrogation room being piped to his work station. ‘It was like listening in to the enemy's mind. It was incredible,' he said.

The final major source of information – the key to what happened in Takhar – was technical intelligence: the constant interception and, as important, tracking of mobile phones and VHF radios, as well as visual surveillance of buildings, vehicles and gatherings of people by means of spy satellites, surveillance planes, helicopters and what had become a huge fleet of drones, each of which had several cameras.

But there were flaws. One of the biggest was that, in order to persuade the special agencies to gather together and share all they knew, the headquarters had to be kept very secure and secret, and could only use the most elite of security-cleared soldiers and the minimum of outsiders.

As he was discussing it, one US military officer involved in the Amanullah case tellingly made constant reference to the world ‘outside'. The war had divided people into insiders and outsiders who lived in parallel. Insiders like this officer lived within the ‘bubble' of bases fortified by razor wire. When they did venture out it was usually to some other ‘secure location' or, if not, in a posse of men armed to the teeth. Ordinary human interaction became impossible. They were cut off from real people.

While this elite had access to tremendous technical tools with which to observe the world, all the secrecy and isolation stymied their ability to check and understand what they picked up. It was hard to look at a problem as a whole or understand the significance of certain elements. In intelligence-speak, nuggets of information tended to get lost in vast ‘silos'. Because everything was kept secret from the wider world, some basic false assumptions – obviously wrong to any man in the street – would never be challenged. And all this scientific espionage was also bewitching. Cool gadgets and smart techniques inspired awe and a confidence that was comparable to religious zeal. It defied good sense.

And there was a further big problem: the absence of good spies. Some reliable secret agents among the Taliban could have made all the difference. But the tempo of JSOC operations made that difficult. Certainly, prisoners held at Bagram could be recruited, but the complex task of running such agents among insurgents in the field was a different matter and not to be tackled lightly. Yet in the absence of high-level secret information from human sources, it could be hard to challenge compelling, if misleading, intelligence from technical sources. Common sense dictated that Amanullah was innocent. But if his voice had been captured by secret interception and the words he spoke seemed suspicious, the Death Star would have needed a reliable source very close to his circle to exonerate him by explaining that what he said was innocent. Technical intelligence, unencumbered by coverage from human sources, could be dangerously persuasive. To find the truth, intrusive surveillance almost requires its mirror image: intrusive spying.

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Obscure and remote as it was, the assassination of Zabet Amanullah in September 2010 caused a shock. He was widely known back in the Afghan capital, Kabul, including by some influential and well-connected people. It was their anger about his killing that motivated their efforts to discover how he was targeted. Their investigation has provided a unique window into the twenty-first-century intelligence machine.

One person who knew Amanullah well was an Irishman named Michael Semple. He was one of those rare people who, by virtue of his work, straddled the worlds of the secret and of the ordinary, which in turn gave him some unique insights. He had come to the region twenty years earlier. Working for the UN and then the EU, he had gradually become involved in trying to foster political reconciliation in Afghanistan. As he made contact with every kind of political, military and religious group, he came to know the men of violence. In 2008, President Karzai had expelled him from the country for allegedly unauthorized contacts with the Taliban, but Semple carried on the same work from Pakistan, where most of the Taliban leadership lived. As an interlocutor, he also frequently crossed paths with Western military and secret intelligence.
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What Semple noticed was just how often those in the secret services convinced themselves of false notions. And just such wrong-headed thinking had led to Amanullah's killing. Semple had known the man for years and would not accept that he had been a secret Taliban commander. Even years before, when the Taliban ruled the country, Semple remembered that Amanullah had helped research the regime's human rights abuses. And then, after the US invaded and the Taliban was toppled, the pair stayed in touch. Semple remembered introducing him to a delegation of British Members of Parliament in Peshawar one week in 2003.

Since 2008, he said, Amanullah had lived peacefully in Kabul and ‘nobody would have considered him a Taliban looking at him there'. If Amanullah had still been with the Taliban, he would not have been involved in the election campaign in Takhar, said Semple. It had meant ‘travelling village to village very publicly and giving speeches. Everybody saw that. So much of Zabet Amanullah's life was in the public domain. And it had nothing whatsoever to do with insurgency.'

Another of those who knew Amanullah was a former BBC foreign correspondent, Kate Clark, who had lived in Kabul under the Taliban and stayed on after. She left journalism to join an academic group called the Afghan Analysts Network, but she had not lost her detective instincts. She first met Amanullah two years before his death, in circumstances that convinced her he could not be an active fighter. He had described being tortured by Pakistan's ISI for refusing to join the Taliban. Even if the US had been right and he had a secret role with the insurgency, why, she wondered, had they simply not arrested him at his Kabul home? She knew he had settled in Kabul, had bought a pharmacy and was studying English and computer science. After his death, she collected paperwork that proved it. The implication from US intelligence was that Amanullah was leading a dual life, that he was some sort of Taliban secret double agent. But then another explanation gradually dawned on her: US intelligence was not even aware of his home and life in the Afghan capital.

Investigating doggedly, Clark used field research to establish that Amanullah was the only person of importance in the convoy, the target of the strike, and that he was definitely the person that NATO referred to as the IMU/Taliban leader ‘Mohamed Amin'. Using her contacts, she then pressed NATO commanders in Kabul for an explanation and finally established direct contact with some officers from JSOC (aka Task Force 535) who ran the operation.

The version of events that can now be revealed is based on what Clark published as a result of her inquiries, on what Semple uncovered and also on further interviews I conducted with some US persons intimately involved (all on condition of anonymity). In addition, much detail is disclosed in an account of the killing, based on insider sources, which was written by a private intelligence operation run in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Duane ‘Dewey' Clarridge, a legendary and controversial former head of counterterrorism at the CIA.
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All of them provide a unique picture of how elite military units make use of intelligence – and the consequence of ignoring the ‘human factor'.

The intelligence story that led to the assassination of Amanullah started in January 2010, when American soldiers took prisoner a man in his twenties named Abdul Rahman, from Takhar Province. Interrogated at Bagram airbase, he named an uncle of his, Mohamed Amin, as a Taliban commander in Takhar. ‘Rahman boasted of having an uncle, Mohammad Amin, who was important in the Taliban and IMU,' recounted Clarridge, and that ‘if spoken to nicely, Rahman could deliver them all for a peace process'.
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Rahman gave his interrogators some mobile numbers for Amin and his contacts.

US intelligence started to track and intercept the phone numbers provided by Rahman, as well as the telephones that they in turn called. One of them, +93 77 5431938, was tracked from Kabul to Takhar Province, and US intelligence came to believe that this was the phone of ‘Mohamed Amin'. Semple knew this number as Amanullah's number. He still had it stored in the address book of his mobile phone years later.

According to a later report by Clark:

The intelligence operation which ultimately led to the 2 September 2010 attack started, according to the Special Forces unit, with information [that] came from a detainee in US custody. This allowed them ultimately to identify a relative of the detainee as the shadow deputy governor of Takhar, one Muhammad Amin, and to map a Taliban and IMU-related cluster through the monitoring of cell phones. The intelligence analysts came to believe that the SIM card of one of the numbers that Muhammad Amin had been calling in Kabul was passed on to him.
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An American involved in the operation said that intercepted phone calls from Amanullah's phone had confirmed that it was used by an active commander who was ordering attacks. There was also talk on the phone of a plan to bribe a judge. The intercepts started in Takhar in March 2010, as well as in Kunduz, Kabul and Pakistan. At one point, he said, Amin had ‘self-identified' as Zabet Amanullah (presumably intelligence speak for Amanullah saying his name out loud). The US believed Amin was using ‘Amanullah' as an undercover alias. Clark was also told there was a ‘voice fingerprint' that confirmed that the two men, Amin and Amanullah, were one and the same.

According to Clarridge, once it was decided that Amanullah's phone was being carried by a Taliban commander, his fate was sealed. When he travelled up from Kabul to Takhar for the election, JSOC picked up the trail of his phone by technical means, and they planned their strike without the slightest knowledge of real events on the ground, including that he would be travelling with election workers. ‘They're tracking the phone and they hear that the guy is going to be in the convoy. It wasn't the guy they were after; it was his
phone.
And that to me says everything about the problem with signals intelligence.' They should have been checking the information with ‘guys on the ground', Clarridge said, but they did not.
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Errors frequently occur in war and, cruel as it may be, in conflict no army is able to ensure that no innocent is ever targeted or hurt. Perhaps the death of Amanullah was simply a mistake – the sort of thing that always happens in the chaos of war. Soldiers talk of Snafu: situation normal all fucked up. But they accept it, because they know the victor is not error-free but just someone who makes fewer important errors than his opponent.

What gave this case resonance, pointing to a more systematic failure in intelligence, was not the fact of the mistake but the vehemence with which those involved defended their actions, as well as the bitter irony of targeting a convoy of people taking part in a democratic election that the US was in the country to promote. It seemed that, despite all their sincerity of purpose, they had lost the ability to see beyond their security bubble and to think like normal people.

Senior US officials involved remained adamant. According to one:

We are very, very confident that Mohamed Amin the individual who was targeted in that strike was an insurgent leader, a member of shadow government in Takhar, and actively involved in insurgent activities. We are very confident that the name Zabet Amanullah was an alias for the individual we know as Mohamed Amin. The individual we targeted used the alias Zabet Amanullah.

That confidence went all the way up to the commander of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan at the time, David Petraeus. Going on to direct the CIA, Petraeus had made his reputation in the Iraq campaign by telling soldiers to get it right – to stop harming the people they had come to save. But, when I asked him about Takhar and what made him think that Amanullah was the right target, his eyes turned steely. Petraeus responded, ‘Well, we didn't think, in this case, with respect, we knew. We had days and days of what's called “The Unblinking Eye”, confirmed by other forms of intelligence that informed us that there is no question about who this individual was.'