The Way of the Knife (19 page)

The conditions were perfect: The United States government was unwilling to send many of its own into Somalia, but it was eager to spend money so others could. By the middle of 2006, Somalia was turning into the outsourced war.

Just a week after the CIA-backed warlords fled Mogadishu, a commercial jet carrying a middle-aged woman from the horse country of Northern Virginia landed in Nairobi. Michele Ballarin was the president of Select Armor, a small company with a contract to sell body armor to the Los Angeles Country Fire Department but one that had found no success winning any big Pentagon deals. But her ambitions were far grander than being a fourth-tier defense contractor. When she landed in Kenya in June 2006, she was scheduled to have a private meeting with Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the man leading Somalia’s UN-backed government-in-exile from his luxurious hotel suite in Nairobi.

It seemed a strange thing that a woman who had the appearance of a wealthy heiress would have an audience with the leader of Somalia’s feckless Transitional Federal Government. But Ballarin had traveled to the Horn of Africa several times before and had developed something of a cult following in some sectors of the Somali political class. She claimed to train and breed Lipizzaner stallions—the famous white horses that performed dressage—and wore her wealth wherever she went. She traveled with Louis Vuitton bags, expensive jewelry, and Gucci clothing. If the idea was to dazzle the residents of one of the world’s poorest countries, it had the intended effect. Somalis began referring to her by a one-word moniker, the Arabic word for “princess.” They called her “Amira.”

It was a long way from West Virginia, where she had first made a name for herself during the 1980s as a Republican candidate in a staunchly Democratic state. She had tried to piggyback on Ronald Reagan’s popularity in the hopes of winning a congressional seat representing Morgantown, the location of West Virginia University. Just thirty-one at the time, she had funded much of her 1986 campaign with money from her first husband, a man several decades older than her who had landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and
amassed a small fortune
as a real-estate developer. But she also hustled to raise money on the campaign trail by showing off her skills as a concert pianist during political fund-raisers. Trying to paint the Democratic incumbent as out of step with the values of West Virginian families, she criticized her opponent during the final weeks of the campaign for his vote to spend taxpayer money to print
Playboy
in Braille. She even made hay of his refusal to show up to one debate by
cutting up a piece of cardboard
, pasting his face on it, and debating him anyway. She was roundly defeated in the election.

After the death of her first husband, she married Gino Ballarin, a former bartender at Manhattan’s 21 Club who went on to own and manage the private Georgetown Club, in Washington. The couple threw parties at their home in Virginia, eventually earning themselves a listing in
The Green Book,
a directory of “socially prominent Washingtonians” that was a bible for the city’s old-money elite. In 1997, she spoke to a reporter about how pleased she was to get into
The Green Book
with all her friends, neighbors, and other “supporters of equine sports.”

“The book symbolizes old ways of doing things which have really rattled against change,” she said. “
It symbolizes a gentler way
of going about living.”

The Ballarins by then were living on an estate in Markham, Virginia, with the grand name Wolf’s Crag. It was once the home of Turner Ashby, a Confederate cavalry commander who gained fame during Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign and earned the nickname “The Black Knight of the Confederacy.” But Michele Ballarin seemed to have bigger plans than living a genteel life of polo matches and lawn parties. During the 1990s and early 2000s she began a number of business ventures, from real-estate development to international finance to selling body armor.

As she describes it, it was a casual meeting with a group of Somali Americans set up by a friend of hers from the Freemason lodge in Washington that sparked her interest in the war-racked country, and
the transformation of Michele into Amira began
. She started traveling to Africa, and soon the devoutly Christian woman who played the organ at her church each Sunday became entranced by the teachings of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam once dominant on the Indian subcontinent and North Africa. Sufism had lost ground after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire had spawned more muscular forms of Islam, but it is still practiced widely in Somalia. Ballarin became convinced that promoting Sufi groups inside the country was the best way to diminish what she saw as a toxic influence of strict Wahhabism that had gained a foothold in the Horn of Africa with the help of rich Saudi donors, who sent money there to build radical schools and mosques.

Her public work in Somalia made her appear like just another rich do-gooder pushing airy-fairy development projects, but there was a darker, edgier side to her projects. When the Islamic Courts Union took control in Mogadishu, she saw an opportunity to take advantage of the vast ungoverned areas in Somalia to set up bases for a resistance movement to drive the Islamists out of power, as well as to nurture business ventures in the country. The horsewoman of Virginia would insert herself into the chaos.

At the meeting with President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Ballarin discussed her plan to set up a base in Somalia’s northern port city of Berbera. The city was home to an abandoned airstrip that NASA had once designated as an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle, and Ballarin figured that the site could be turned into a hub for commercial traffic and a location to train anti–al Shabaab forces. President Ahmed, a political figurehead seeking refuge inside a plush hotel in Nairobi, was hardly in a position to sign off on Ballarin’s plan. But when she emerged from the meeting, Ballarin was elated. Days later, she dashed off an e-mail to several of her business partners in the United States, including Chris Farina, the head of a Florida-based private security firm called ATS Worldwide.

“Boys, successful meeting with President Abdullay Yussef [
sic
] and his chief of staff personnel,” Ballarin wrote. “
He has appointed his chief
of presidential protocol as our go to during this phase.” Later in the e-mail, Ballarin implied that the CIA was aware of her plans, and that she was planning to meet a CIA contact of hers in New York.

But Farina urged caution, writing back to warn that the plan shouldn’t go off half-cocked. “A forced entry operation [into Mogadishu] at this point without the addition of follow-on forces who can capitalize on the momentum/initiative of the initial op will result in a replay of Dien Bien Phu,” he wrote, referring to
the French debacle in Indochina in 1954
.

Farina also told Ballarin that perhaps the CIA wasn’t the best partner for their efforts—perhaps wise advice, given what had just happened in the country.
A better bet, he said, was the Pentagon
.

She eventually took his advice, but it would be another two years before she managed to convince the Pentagon to fund her adventures inside Somalia.

—

THE ISLAMIC COURTS UNION’S
takeover in Mogadishu at first brought a calm to the capital that it had not known for years. A city that warlords had divided up was now open. Children who had grown up within a mile of the sea but who had never actually seen the water, because it meant crossing into the zone of a rival warlord, were
free to spend the day at the beach
.

But a series of pronouncements that summer by the al Shabaab wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which had in effect seized control of the ICU movement, turned many Somalis against the new leaders. Foreign films were banned, as were soccer games. Women were forced to veil their faces. Most unpopular of all was a ban on khat, the narcotic green leaf that almost all Somali men chewed daily to bring on a mild, pleasant haze.

The concerns in Washington about the imposition of sharia law in Mogadishu were stoked by a stream of intelligence fed to the Bush administration by Ethiopian officials, who feared that a new al Qaeda safe haven might be emerging on their eastern border. Animosities between Ethiopians and Somalis ran deep. During the 1970s the two countries fought a territorial battle over the Ogaden region of Ethiopia that became a proxy conflict of the Cold War—with the United States supporting Somalia and the Soviet Union giving military supplies to the Ethiopians. But the fall of the Soviet Union reshuffled the alliances in Africa, as it did in so many other parts of the world. During the 1990s, with Washington worrying about the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, Ethiopia and its Christian majority came to be seen as natural allies for the United States.

So, during the summer of 2006, when Ethiopian officials began to talk openly about the possibility of invading Somalia to dismantle the Islamic Courts Union and al Shabaab, some in Washington saw an opportunity. The strategy to arm a ragtag collection of warlords had failed, but maybe the Ethiopian army could become America’s new proxy force in Somalia. Within weeks of the Islamist takeover in Mogadishu, General John Abizaid, of U.S. Central Command, visited Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, during a tour of East Africa. During meetings with military, CIA, and State Department officials at the American embassy, he asked about what Ethiopia’s military might need if they were going to drive their tanks toward Mogadishu.

Abizaid made it clear that, while the United States would not push Ethiopia to invade,
it would try to ensure
that an invasion was a success. He also met with Ethiopian officials and offered to share American intelligence about ICU military positions inside Somalia. Back in Washington, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte authorized spy satellites to be trained on Somalia to provide detailed pictures for the Ethiopian troops. “The idea,” as one American official stationed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2006 described it, “was to get the Ethiopians to fight our war.”

The Ethiopian invasion would also provide cover for American commando missions into Somalia, launched from a base in the coffee-growing region of eastern Ethiopia. During the summer and fall of 2006, when it increasingly looked like Ethiopian troops might invade Somalia, Navy Seabees arrived at the base in Dire Dawa, three hundred miles east of Addis Ababa. Officially, the Seabees were there on a humanitarian mission: Treacherous rains had flooded the plains around Dire Dawa and sent a ten-foot wall of water crashing through the town, and the Seabees helped set up tents and give emergency medical care for the
ten thousand people displaced by the floods
.

But besides the humanitarian supplies, the C-130 transport planes arriving in Dire Dawa also began ferrying in war materiel for a group of Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos who were trickling into Ethiopia as part of a secret JSOC unit called Task Force 88. Their plan was to use Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia as a cover to get into the country and hunt down
senior ICU operatives
.

The mission to Somalia had been authorized under Donald Rumsfeld’s 2004 order permitting military commandos to infiltrate countries that had traditionally been off-limits to American soldiers. In early January 2007, just days after the first Ethiopian tank columns rumbled over the border and artillery batteries started pounding Islamic Courts Union military installations in southwest Somalia, Task Force 88 began its missions inside the country. Attached to the group were surveillance experts from Gray Fox, the Pentagon’s clandestine spying unit that would eventually change its code name to Task Force Orange. The group carried specialized equipment allowing it to pinpoint the locations of ICU commanders by intercepting their telephone communications.

In addition to the special-operations troops, two AC-130 gunships armed with 105-millimeter cannons and Gatling guns arrived at the airstrip in eastern Ethiopia, and in early January the gunships launched an attack on
a small fishing village
in the swamplands of southern Somalia. They were acting on intelligence that Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, the young al Shabaab leader, was hiding in the village of Ras Kamboni. Hours after a barrage of missiles, American and Ethiopian troops sifted through the wreckage and found a passport of Ayro’s stained with blood. The Americans assumed that Ayro would not have lasted long if he had been wounded in the strike, but nobody was sure where he had gone. The AC-130 gunships carried out a second strike two weeks later against a different Islamist commander, but the attack killed civilians instead of its intended target.

The clandestine missions in Somalia in early 2007 had mixed results. American troops and intelligence aided the Ethiopian offensive through southern Somalia and led to a swift retreat by Islamic Courts Union troops. But the JSOC missions had failed to capture or kill any of the most senior Islamist commanders or members of the al Qaeda cell responsible for the 1998 embassy bombings. And, beyond the narrow manhunt, the larger Ethiopian occupation of Somalia could fairly be called a disaster.

The Bush administration had secretly backed the operation, believing that Ethiopian troops could drive the Islamist Courts Union out of Mogadishu and provide military protection for the UN-backed transitional government. The invasion had achieved that first objective, but the impoverished Ethiopian government had little interest in spending money to keep its troops in Somalia to protect the corrupt transitional government. Within weeks of the end of fighting, senior Ethiopian officials declared that they had met their military objectives and began talking publicly about a withdrawal.

The Ethiopian army had waged a bloody and indiscriminate campaign against its most hated enemy. Using lead-footed urban tactics, Ethiopian troops lobbed artillery shells into crowded marketplaces and dense neighborhoods, killing thousands of civilians. Discipline in the Ethiopian ranks broke down, and soldiers went on rampages of looting and gang rape. One young man interviewed by the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch spoke of witnessing Ethiopians
kill his father
and then rape his mother and sisters.