The Way of the Knife (27 page)

The CIA was now in open warfare with Furlong, and even his supporters could no longer protect him. The station chief’s cable launched a wave of investigations into Furlong’s activities. By the spring of 2010 security officers at San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force Base had cut off his access to classified computer networks and barred him from his office.

He was in limbo—not charged with any crimes but not able to defend himself, because he could not get access to any of his classified records. He spent nearly all of his time inside his sparsely furnished condominium, in a bland apartment complex in San Antonio, trying to prepare his defense and hiding from the television reporters who had gathered outside of his gate when news of the spying operation broke.

The Pentagon’s final report on the matter pinned almost all the blame on Furlong, calling his spying operation “unauthorized” and accusing him of misleading top American commanders about the legality of the work of the contractors. But he avoided any criminal charges and quietly retired from the Defense Department.

Furlong had certainly cut corners, and his attempts to evade standard bureaucratic procedures created confusion up and down the military’s chain of command. But in Furlong’s view of the world, these were small matters when American troops were dying and the CIA was not helping the military win the war in Afghanistan. His spying operation was essential, he said later, “when there are lives at stake and the CIA is relying on foreign services for all its information.”

And Furlong wasn’t exactly a rogue operator. The entire episode was born from the frustrations of an American general in Afghanistan who didn’t trust the CIA and who set Michael Furlong loose. If, as the Pentagon investigation into the operation concluded, nobody “connected the dots” about what Furlong was doing, it was because nobody wanted to.

“My bosses wanted all of this,” Furlong said, smoking the fifth cigarette of a lengthy interview. “
And I made it happen
.”

—

THE LOCKHEED MARTIN CONTRACT
that Michael Furlong had secured expired at the end of May 2010, and the money funding Dewey Clarridge’s network of agents in Pakistan and Afghanistan ran dry. Clarridge was angry that the military had chosen not to renew the contract, and even angrier that the CIA seemed to be the reason that the operation had been shut down. He had sent hundreds of intelligence reports to military commanders in Afghanistan, and he sent a message to Kabul on May 15 that he would stop sending the reports so he could “
prepare approximately 200 local personnel
to cease work.”

But Clarridge had no intention of dismantling his network. The very next day, he set up a password-protected Web site that would allow military officers to continue viewing his dispatches, and he leaned on some wealthy friends to help keep his network afloat. He set up a front company for his operation, the Eclipse Group, and on his Web site he posted the same types of intelligence reports he had once given to the military. There were specific reports about how Pakistan’s ISI was training gunmen to launch attacks into Afghanistan, and about how Pakistani spies were secretly keeping Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar under house arrest so they could later install him as their puppet in southern Afghanistan once American troops left the country. Another report speculated that Mullah Omar had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital by ISI operatives.

He dreamt up ever more exotic schemes to bring down those he thought were trying to undermine the American war effort. For instance, he was convinced that Afghan president Hamid Karzai was secretly negotiating with Iran as part of a desperate attempt to sell out the Americans and remain in power in Kabul, so Clarridge cooked up a plan to dig up hard evidence to prove long-standing rumors that Karzai was a heroin addict.

The plan was straight from the old CIA playbook of dirty tricks: He would insert an agent into the presidential palace in Kabul to collect Karzai’s beard trimmings, run drug tests, and then give the proof to American commanders in Kabul, who could confront Karzai with the incriminating evidence and turn the Afghan president into a more pliable ally. He dropped the plan after the Obama administration signaled it was committed to bolstering the Karzai government, not pushing the Afghan president out of power.

Even when news of the private spying operation went public and military officials grew worried about accepting information from Clarridge’s network, he found other ways to get his information to the public. Clarridge’s friends sent the reports to pro-military writers like Brad Thor, a successful author of spy thrillers, who dispensed some of Clarridge’s information on blog posts. He even pushed information to Oliver North, his old compatriot from the Iran–Contra days, now an on-air personality on Fox News.

It was just like the old days, when Dewey and Ollie were doing the work they thought nobody else had the guts to do.

12:
THE SCALPEL’S EDGE

“
We’ll continue saying
the bombs are ours, not yours.”

—President Ali Abdullah Saleh

T
he meeting was set up for a surrender, a symbolic gesture of peace timed to the holy month of Ramadan. The Saudi minister had even sent his personal jet to pick up the frail young man and deliver him to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city built along the shores of the Red Sea. There, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef was conducting the Ramadan custom of greeting well-wishers at his home, and he gave an order to his coterie of aides that Abdullah al-Asiri be allowed to bypass normal security procedures and not be searched as he entered the palace.

Al-Asiri had contacted Prince bin Nayef, the assistant interior minister and a member of the Saudi ruling family, days earlier, announcing his intention to surrender to the Saudi spy service and provide information about the group he had joined two years earlier, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s terror network that had recently rebranded itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The group considered Prince bin Nayef its bête noire, a man committed to crushing Sunni extremism in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the country’s impoverished neighbor to the south. In 2003, when militants in Yemen launched a twenty-month campaign of violence inside Saudi Arabia—blowing up Saudi government buildings and oil facilities, bombing residential compounds used by foreigners, and beheading Westerners—bin Nayef ordered a bloody crackdown involving arresting and torturing thousands of suspects rounded up inside the country. He
posted informants inside mosques
he believed had been infiltrated by extremists.

Bin Nayef’s aggression against al Qaeda had made him a friend of the Bush administration, and by the summer of 2009 a new American president and his aides already considered the prince an indispensable ally. He regularly received dignitaries from Washington, including a visit in May 2009 from a veteran diplomat whom President Obama had just charged with trying to manage an acceptable end to the war in Afghanistan. But when Richard Holbrooke met the prince in Riyadh to solicit the kingdom’s help with a war America was losing, the prince warned that the United States might have a far greater worry than the spiraling violence in Afghanistan. “
We have a problem
called Yemen,” bin Nayef told Holbrooke.

The prince ticked off a list of worries to the American envoy. Yemen’s tribes were more sympathetic to al Qaeda than were Afghans, and Yemen was closer to al Qaeda’s targets in Saudi Arabia than was Afghanistan. Yemen was a failed state, he said, with a weak and corrupt leader in President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose vision for the country had “shrunk to Sana’a”—keeping the capital, and his base, secure. Saleh had always managed to keep Yemen’s tribes in check, he said, but the president was losing control and passing more power over to his son, who didn’t have close ties to the tribes. Cash payments to Saleh’s government were useless, the Saudi said, because the president and those around him move the money out of the country as soon as it arrives.

“The money ends up in Swiss bank accounts,” Prince bin Nayef told Holbrooke.

Instead, the Saudi government had begun paying for development projects in areas of Yemen where al Qaeda militants had put down roots, in the hope that the projects might drain away support for extremists and “persuade Yemenis to see extremists as criminals rather than heroes.” At the end of their meeting, Holbrooke promised the prince that President Obama would work with the kingdom to dismantle al Qaeda’s growing network in Yemen.

It was a stroke of luck, bin Nayef figured, when Abdullah al-Asiri contacted the Saudis three months later with his offer to surrender. Al-Asiri was one of eighty-five militants associated with “deviant groups” that the Saudis had been hunting, as was the young man’s older brother Ibrahim. Ibrahim had been arrested for trying to join the insurgency in Iraq in 2003, and his time in prison in Saudi Arabia had kindled in him a hatred for the kingdom and its alliance with the United States, which he likened to the relationship between master and slave. Of the two brothers, it was Ibrahim whom the Saudis considered far more dangerous; he had been trained as a bomb maker, with a sinister gift for finding creative ways to hide explosives. Conscious that the Saudis might suspect the planned “surrender” was an elaborate subterfuge for the al-Asiri brothers to take revenge against Prince bin Nayef, Ibrahim devised a bomb that could evade standard security precautions. Shortly before the younger al-Asiri boarded the Saudi royal’s jet for the flight to Jeddah, Ibrahim had a bomb of pentaerythritol tetranitrate—a type of plastic explosive—implanted in Abdullah’s rectum.

But for all of Ibrahim’s genius as a bomb maker, his lethal plots were often undone by the incompetence of his bombers. His brother had traveled with the hidden explosive from Yemen to Jeddah and arrived without incident at Prince bin Nayef’s palace. After the nervous Abdullah al-Asiri entered the room where the prince was receiving visitors, he reached into his robe to trigger the explosives but set the bomb off too early, before he was close enough to the prince. The explosion blew al-Asiri in half,
leaving a smoking crater
on the tiled floor and bloodstains throughout the room. Prince bin Nayef received only minor wounds from the blast.

The attack was a failure. But al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had managed to carry out its first operation outside of Yemen. If the group was embarrassed by the clumsiness of its assassin, it gave no indication in a boastful message it released shortly after the attack. It was the Saudis who should be embarrassed, the statement read, because Abdullah al-Asiri’s security breach was the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia’s history, and the militant group was in the process of uprooting
a Saudi spy network in Yemen
that the royal family had set up to infiltrate AQAP.

For those in Riyadh now living in fear, and those in Washington now paying attention, the statement promised more attacks to come:

“Oh tyrants, rest assured that you will suffer, because your fortress won’t be able to protect you from us.

“
We will reach you soon
.”

—

THE DAY AFTER
Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States, Prince bin Nayef received a call from an old friend in Washington. The man on the other end of the phone was John Brennan, a former top CIA officer who had advised Senator Obama during the campaign and had been tapped as Obama’s senior counterterrorism adviser in the White House. It wasn’t the job Brennan had wanted. At the end of the presidential campaign he was assumed to be the leading candidate to take over the CIA, were Obama elected. He had the right credentials: A son of Irish immigrants, Brennan was raised in New Jersey and attended Fordham University; he had spent decades as a CIA analyst and spoke fluent Arabic. He even had the rare experience of serving as a CIA station chief in Riyadh in the 1990s, despite being an analyst, not an undercover case officer. A large man with a face that looked like it had been carved from a slab of limestone, Brennan had the appearance of a Depression-era boxer.

But his dream of taking over the CIA was thwarted during Obama’s transition, when remarks he had made—seeming to endorse the brutal interrogation methods the CIA had used in secret prisons—resurfaced and were criticized by human-rights activists. Brennan had been among George Tenet’s top advisers when the prison program was put in place, in 2002, and therefore was closely tethered to a program that Obama had frequently said was a dark stain on America’s record since the September 11 attacks. Fearing a lengthy and distracting confirmation battle in the Senate,
Brennan withdrew his name
from consideration for the CIA job.

The position in the White House may have been a consolation prize, but in a short time Brennan would turn his windowless basement office in the West Wing into an operations hub for the clandestine wars that President Obama would champion as president. Obama’s desire to manage aspects of the targeted-killing program directly from the White House gave Brennan a role unique in the history of American government: one part executioner, one part chief confessor to the president, one part public spokesman sent out to justify the Obama doctrine of killing off America’s enemies in remote parts of the world.

When Brennan called bin Nayef that day in January 2009, he pledged to the man he had come to know well since his days in Riyadh that President
Obama was just as committed
to hunting and killing terrorists as President Bush had been. During the transition after Obama’s election, Brennan and the other senior members of Obama’s national-security team had been briefed over two days at CIA headquarters, where top agency officials ran through the list of covert-action programs on the books. The head of the Counterterrorism Center, the undercover officer with the first name Mike, told the group that President Bush had accelerated the pace of drone strikes the previous summer and that the CIA was trying to get more spies into Pakistan. During the presidential campaign, Obama had repeatedly pledged that he would focus attention on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the hunt for Osama bin Laden—a renewed emphasis on the so-called “good war” that Bush had ignored by starting the “bad war” in Iraq. At the meetings, Brennan told Mike and Stephen Kappes, the deputy CIA director whom Obama had asked to stay in his job at Langley, that
the drone killings in Pakistan
were likely to continue under Obama’s watch.