The Way of the Knife (31 page)

Clearly, the campaign in the Horn of Africa was still being waged in a haphazard and scattershot manner, with the United States conducting an outsourced war using proxy forces and warlords. Somalia was considered a threat, but not enough of a peril to merit an American military campaign there. So the doors opened for contractors like Ballarin who offered to fill the intelligence void, just as Dewey Clarridge had done for Pakistan.

Somalia was slowly turning into a haven for all manner of clandestine operations: from the secret counterterrorism missions of Western governments to wild schemes by contractors to chase pirates. One such plan was hatched with the help of Erik Prince, former head of the beleaguered Blackwater Worldwide, who had left the United States to begin a new chapter in the United Arab Emirates. There, he said, it would be hard for the “jackals”—trial lawyers and congressional investigators—
to hound him and go after his money
. Besides a secret project to help the UAE build a mercenary army of Colombian soldiers, an army that Emirati officials envisioned could be dispatched to put down domestic unrest in the country and even deter attacks from Iran, Prince began working with a group of South African mercenaries to help build
a counterpiracy force
in northern Somalia.

The UAE had grown worried about the pirates off the Horn of Africa who were picking off ships going to and from the Persian Gulf, and Emirati officials and Prince worked to develop a new strategy for combating piracy: Instead of trying to challenge the pirates on the high seas,
a new militia would carry out raids
in the pirate dens on land. Never one to dodge controversy, Prince met with officials from a South African company called Saracen International, a private security firm at the time run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s apartheid-era Civil Cooperation Bureau. The CCB had a brutal record of carrying out assassinations and intimidating black South Africans, and after the fall of apartheid, many of its former members became guns for hire in the myriad civil wars of the African continent. The counterpiracy operation was just the latest below-the-radar adventure for Luitingh and the South African mercenaries in a part of the world that was still very much ignored.

Besides the efforts of private companies, the military’s Joint Special Operations Command began paying greater attention to fighting a stealth war against militants in Somalia. Just as he had proposed for Yemen, Admiral William McRaven at JSOC discussed with officials in Washington a plan for a full-fledged special-operations task force for Somalia, modeled after the task force in Iraq that had eviscerated the al Qaeda affiliate there: Navy SEAL snatch-and-grab and prisoner interrogations in al Shabaab–held territories to dismantle the group.

Somalia was, compared with Yemen and Pakistan, both an easier and a more difficult environment for a clandestine war. Unlike Pakistan and Yemen, there was no central government for the Americans to work with, and no local intelligence service that could penetrate al Shabaab. On the other hand, Somalia presented none of the headaches of having to ask permission before the United States carried out a targeted-killing operation. There was no Ali Abdullah Saleh or Pervez Musharraf who needed to be courted, no secret cash payments for the right to wage war inside another country. Somalia was, as one senior military officer involved in planning Horn of Africa operations put it, “a complete free-fire zone.”

But the JSOC proposals found little support. The baggage of the Black Hawk Down episode still weighed down any discussion of counterterrorism operations in Somalia, and the White House ultimately rejected Admiral McRaven’s ambitious proposals,
insisting that each military operation
inside Somalia be approved personally by the president. Obama administration lawyers even debated whether al Shabaab, which had not carried out acts of terrorism against the United States, could be a target. Was the group a threat to America or a local militia that Washington should simply ignore?

It was sometimes hard to take the group seriously. Even as it tried to blanket Mogadishu under strict sharia law, ordering that thieves have their hands chopped off and adulterers be stoned to death, al Shabaab also engaged in erratic and even comic behavior. Al Shabaab leaders would make strange pronouncements in desperate attempts to gain new recruits. They held a talent show in the vein of the television program
American Idol
and a trivia game for children between the ages of ten and seventeen where contestants were asked questions like, “In which war was our leader Sheikh Timajilic killed?”
First prize was an AK-47
assault rifle. After the U.S. State Department offered cash rewards for the whereabouts of al Shabaab leaders, one top al Shabaab operative told thousands of Somalis gathered after their Friday prayers that the militant group was offering rewards of its own for information about the “hideouts” of top American officials. The person who helped lead al Shabaab to the “idiot Obama” would be rewarded with ten camels. Ten chickens and ten roosters would go to the person with information about the hideout of the “
old woman Hillary Clinton
.”

With few options for detaining terror suspects, and little appetite for extensive ground operations in Somalia, killing sometimes was a far more appealing option than capturing. In September 2009, JSOC scored an intelligence coup: precise information on the whereabouts of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan member of al Qaeda’s East Africa cell, which had carried out the 1998 American-embassy attacks, and a man thought to be the liaison between al Qaeda and al Shabaab. The intelligence indicated that, after months of moving inside cities and towns that made American airstrikes impossible, Nabhan was set to travel in a truck convoy from Mogadishu to the seaside town of Barawa. During a videoconference connecting the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and JSOC headquarters at Fort Bragg, Admiral McRaven led the group through the various strike options. The option carrying the least risk was to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from a ship off the coast, or missiles from a military plane. Alternatively, McRaven said, Navy SEALs flying in AH-6 helicopters could swoop in on the convoy, kill Nabhan, and collect enough DNA evidence at the scene to confirm his death. Finally, McRaven presented a variation on option two: Instead of killing Nabhan, the SEALs would snatch him, put him into one of the helicopters, and
take him somewhere for interrogation
. President Obama chose what was thought to be the least risky option: a missile strike on the convoy.

But things didn’t go as planned. With JSOC making final preparations for the operation, code-named Celestial Balance, the missile-launcher malfunctioned on the plane that had been designated for the mission. With time running out and Nabhan on the move, McRaven ordered that the commandos carry out the fallback plan: The SEALs waiting on a Navy ship off the Somali coast loaded into the helicopters and headed west, into Somali airspace. The helicopters strafed the convoy, killing Nabhan and three al Shabaab operatives.

The operation was a success in Somalia, but for some involved in the mission planning, the entire episode had raised uncomfortable questions. Because Plan A had failed, the United States was forced to take the extraordinary step of using troops in one of the most hostile countries in the world. But once the troops were there, why didn’t they just capture Nabhan instead of kill him? Part of the answer was that a capture mission was considered too risky. But that wasn’t the only reason. Killing was the preferred course of action in Somalia, and as one person involved in the mission planning put it, “We didn’t capture him because it would have been hard to find a place to put him.”

—

THE PENTAGON
had originally hired Michele Ballarin and Perry Davis to come up with the type of information that had led to Nabhan’s killing. This gave Ballarin clout during her frequent trips to East Africa, where she boasted about her ties to the American government during private meetings with various Somali factions. Each trip brought new business opportunities, and as Somalia emerged as the world’s epicenter of international piracy, she saw the windfall that could come from acting as an intermediary in the ransom negotiations. Ballarin’s primary contact from the Pentagon office that awarded her the contract had pushed her to develop relations with the clans in Somalia with close ties to the pirate networks, and by the time the pirates displayed the
AMIRA
sign from the
Faina
’s hull she had designs on becoming the go-to ransom negotiator. She said publicly that her interests in negotiating were purely humanitarian, but privately Ballarin told some of her employees that taking a cut of the ransom payments could be lucrative as the scourge of piracy worsened. “She had this dream of handling all of the negotiations, and getting rich,” said Bill Deininger, a former colleague. In one interview she told a reporter that her goal was to “unwind all seventeen ships and all four hundred fifty people” that
Somali pirates were currently holding
.

Deininger was one of a number of disgruntled former employees who became disillusioned with Ballarin and quit working for her when they thought she had
failed to deliver
on her many promises. Some retired military officers she had hired to work for her various companies put up some of their own money when they joined Ballarin’s service, and felt burned when they didn’t recoup their investment. Although the Pentagon gave her seed money for her information-gathering project in 2008, she struggled to get a steady stream of money from government contracts, and cut ties with many of her partners.

And yet she maintained the appearance of a lavish lifestyle in the rolling hills of Virginia beyond the Washington beltway. She continued to court senior American military and intelligence officials, often at the large brick mansion that she rented, which doubled as an antiques store and sat on 110 acres that was once the domain of horse farms but more recently had become part of Washington’s sprawling exurbs. She entertained American and African officials in the mansion’s dining room, a space decorated with antique vases, hunting prints, and a large gallery of photos of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. Bedecked in jewelry and sometimes caressing a string of prayer beads, she presided over the meetings at the head of a large antique table. At regular intervals, Perry Davis would get up and refill visitors’ teacups with a sweet blend of Kenyan black tea with cardamom, cloves, and other spices.

Ballarin continued to make trips to East Africa, building up ties to factions inside Somalia united by their adherence to Sufism. And she eventually developed a catchphrase for her work inside Somalia: She was providing “organic solutions” to problems that had festered for decades, solutions that couldn’t be enacted by foreign governments or what she saw as meddlesome outside groups like the United Nations. During an interview with the Voice of America she spoke about a “soft-sided” approach, eschewing violence.

“The Somalis have seen enough conflict, they’ve seen enough private military companies, they’ve seen bloodshed, they’ve seen enough gunpowder, they’ve seen enough bullets,” she said. “All the ugly things that have created a generation of young people who don’t know anything else. Why would anyone who cares deeply about this culture want to perpetuate that?
It’s not the way forward
; it really isn’t.”

But her definition of an “organic solution” was clearly elastic. In 2009, for example, she tried to help a group of Somali hit men kill five prominent al Shabaab operatives who were gathering for a meeting in Mogadishu.
All they needed, she said
, were silencers for their handguns.

In her telling of the story, the details of which a former American government official confirmed, she was sitting in her suite at the Djibouti Palace Kempinski, the only five-star hotel in the tiny, impoverished nation. The hotel was hosting an international conference to select the next leaders of Somalia’s anemic transitional government—a literal gathering of the clans. After negotiations in conference rooms and poolside, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a moderate, former commander of the Islamic Courts Union, was chosen to run the country.

In the middle of one night, a group of Somalis knocked on Ballarin’s door and took her to meet a senior official of Somalia’s new transitional government. There, the Somali official told her that he had been in contact with a senior al Shabaab operative who was interested in switching sides and joining the government. The informant knew about an upcoming gathering of al Shabaab leaders and was offering—with America’s blessing—to kill them all.

His list of needs was short: His men would need some training with handguns, and silencers to ensure that the operation could be carried out as discreetly as possible. And the defector wanted the United States to put up money to help the widows and children of the slain al Shabaab leaders.

When Ballarin returned to the United States, she and Perry Davis contacted a small group of military officers they knew at the Pentagon. As she saw it, this was not a difficult decision, and she later recalled with a measure of anger what she told the military officials with whom she had met.

“This is manna from heaven! Take it!” she recalled telling the military men.

But the Americans balked. If JSOC was going to bless the operation, the Americans were going to do it themselves. But Ballarin thought that having Somalis—rather than American commandos or other foreign proxies—kill the top echelon of al Shabaab in one blow would be especially crippling for an indigenous terror organization.

“
This
is an organic solution,” she said. “You don’t dispatch SEAL teams. This is Somali-style, and this isn’t pleasant stuff we’re talking about.”

When she recalled the episode several years later, she spoke wistfully about what might have been.

“All they wanted was silencers.”

Ballarin wasn’t content with playing the role of mere passive collector of intelligence. Her vision was to be at the center of a great Sufi awakening, overseeing the unification of various Sufi groups across North and East Africa in a forceful campaign against Wahhabism. When al Shabaab militants took over radio stations in Mogadishu, banning music and forcing radio programmers to introduce news reports with the sounds of canned gunfire, bleating goats, and clucking chickens, Ballarin wrote a song of resistance to the Sufis of Somalia. The song, written in English and sung by a Brazilian pop singer, carried the rallying cry “
Sufi life they’ll never defeat!”