The Way of the Knife (39 page)

Impressed by the CIA’s record of targeted killings in Pakistan, White House officials took the hunt for Anwar al-Awlaki away from the Pentagon and gave it to the CIA. On September 30, a fleet of American drones took off from the base in Saudi Arabia, crossed into Yemen, and began tracking a group of men riding in a convoy across al Jawf province, an expanse of desert near the Saudi border once renowned for breeding Arabian horses. The men had stopped to eat breakfast when, according to witnesses, they spotted the drones and rushed back to their cars. But the drones had locked onto their target, and what followed was a carefully orchestrated symphony of destruction. Two Predator drones pointed lasers on the cars, a tactic that improved the accuracy of the missile strikes, and a Reaper drone fired missiles that delivered a direct hit. Every man riding in the convoy was killed, including American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, a diabolical propagandist and the creative force behind
Inspire
.

—

ABDULRAHMAN AL-AWLAKI—
the imam’s skinny sixteen-year-old Denver-born son—had slipped out of the kitchen window in his family’s house in Sana’a two weeks earlier. It was the only home he had known since he moved to Yemen as a young boy, after his father had become famous in the United States and the United Kingdom for his inflammatory sermons. In the years since, his father became the Obama administration’s most hunted man and fled Sana’a for the relative security of Yemen’s remote provinces, but Abdulrahman mostly lived the life of a normal adolescent. He entered high school with an interest in sports and music, and he kept his Facebook page regularly updated.

In the middle of September 2011, he decided he needed to find his father, wherever he was hiding. Before sneaking out of the house, he left a note for his relatives:

“I am sorry for leaving,” he wrote, “
I’m going to find my father
.”

He went to Shabwa province, the region of Yemen where Anwar al-Awlaki was thought to be hiding and where American jets and drones had narrowly missed him the previous May. What Abdulrahman did not know was that his father had already fled Shabwa for al Jawf. He wandered about, having little idea about what to do next. Then, he heard the news about the missile strike that had killed his father, and he called his family back in Sana’a. He told them he was coming home.

He didn’t return to Sana’a immediately. On October 14, two weeks after CIA drones killed his father, Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki was sitting with friends
at an open-air restaurant near Azzan, a town in Shabwa province. From a distance, faint at first, came the familiar buzzing sound. Then, missiles tore through the air and hit the restaurant. Within seconds, nearly a dozen dead bodies were strewn in the dirt. One of them was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Hours after the news of his death was reported, the teenager’s Facebook page was turned into a memorial.

American officials have never discussed the operation publicly, but they acknowledge in private that Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed by mistake. The teenager had not been on any target list. The intended target of the drone strike was Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian leader of AQAP. American officials had gotten information that al-Banna was eating at the restaurant at the time of the strike, but the intelligence turned out to be wrong. Al-Banna was nowhere near the location of the missile strike. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although the strike remains classified, several American officials said that the drones that killed the boy were not, like those that killed his father, operated by the CIA. Instead, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a victim of the parallel drone program run by the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which had continued even after the CIA joined the manhunt in Yemen. The CIA and the Pentagon had converged on the killing grounds of one of the world’s poorest and most desolate countries, running two distinct drone wars. The CIA maintained one target list, and JSOC kept another. Both were in Yemen carrying out nearly the exact same mission. Ten years after Donald Rumsfeld first tried to wrest control of the new war from American spies, the Pentaton and CIA were conducting the same secret missions at the ends of the earth.

Two months after his son and grandson were killed, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki mourned their deaths in a video eulogy he posted on YouTube. Dr. al-Awlaki spoke for nearly seven minutes in clear, deliberate English. Loyal Muslims must keep his son Anwar’s message alive, he said, and spread it to all those who had not yet been touched by his words. He pledged, ominously and without further detail, that his son’s “
blood did not and will not go in vain
.”

Dr. al-Awlaki described America as a “state gone mad,” enthralled with a strategy of assassinations in the darkest corners of the world. The attacks had become so routine, he said, that the strikes that killed his son and grandson went almost unnoticed inside the United States. This was partly right. On the day Anwar al-Awlaki was killed, President Obama made brief mention of his death during a speech, calling it “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates.” But by the next day, the killing of the firebrand preacher—an American citizen whose death had been authorized by a secret Justice Department memo—received no mention on network nightly news broadcasts. Two weeks later, barely any attention was paid to the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the skinny American teenager.

—

THE DRONE STRIKES REMAINED
a secret, at least officially. The Obama administration has gone to court to fend off challenges over the release of documents related to CIA and JSOC drones and the secret legal opinions buttressing the operations. In late September 2012, a panel of three judges sat in front of a wall of green marble in a federal courtroom in Washington and listened to oral arguments in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union demanding that the CIA hand over documents about the targeted-killing program. A lawyer representing the CIA refused to acknowledge that the CIA had anything to do with drones, even under cross-examination from skeptical judges who questioned him about public statements by former CIA director Leon Panetta. In one case, Panetta had joked to a group of American troops stationed in Naples, Italy, that, although as secretary of defense he had “a helluva lot more weapons available . . . than . . . at CIA,” the “Predators [weren’t] that bad.”

At one point in the court proceeding, an exasperated Judge Merrick Garland pointed out the absurdity of the CIA’s position, in light of the fact that both President Obama and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan had spoken publicly about drones. “If the CIA is the emperor,” he told the CIA’s lawyer, “you’re asking us to say that the emperor has clothes even when the emperor’s bosses say he doesn’t.”

But for all the secrecy, drone warfare has been institutionalized, ensuring that the missions of the CIA and the Pentagon continue to bleed together as the two organizations fight for more resources to wage secret war. Sometimes, as in Yemen, the two agencies run parallel and competing drone operations. Other times, they carve up the world and each take charge of different parts of the remote-controlled war—the CIA in Pakistan, for instance, and the Pentagon running the drone war in Libya.

It was July 2004 when the 9/11 Commission concluded that the CIA should give up its paramilitary functions. It made little sense, the commission concluded, for the CIA and the Pentagon to both be in the business of waging clandestine wars. “Whether the price is measured in either money or people,” the commission’s final report stated, “the United States cannot afford to build two separate capabilities for carrying out secret military operations, secretly operating standoff missiles, and secretly training foreign military or paramilitary forces.”

The Bush administration rejected this recommendation, and in the years since, the United States has moved in the exact opposite direction. The CIA and the Pentagon now each jealously guard different parts of the shadow war’s architecture—a drone base in Saudi Arabia, a former French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti, and other remote outposts—and are loath to relinquish any control as politicians embrace targeted-killing operations as the future of American warfare. Meanwhile, the Pentagon continues its push into human spying. The Defense Intelligence Agency is hoping to build a new cadre of undercover spies, hundreds of them, for spying missions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. “Everything is backwards,” said W. George Jameson, a lawyer who spent thirty-three years at the CIA. “
You’ve got an intelligence agency
fighting a war and a military organization trying to gather on-the-ground intelligence.”

Throughout the grueling presidential election season of 2012, President Obama frequently alluded to targeted killings as a sign of his toughness, speaking with braggadocio reminiscent of President Bush during the early days after the September 11 attacks. Once, a reporter asked him about accusations made by Republican presidential candidates that his foreign policy amounted to a strategy of appeasement. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the twenty-two out of thirty al Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” Obama shot back. “
Or whoever is left out there
, ask them about that.”

For all their policy differences during the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama and Governor Mitt Romney found nothing to disagree about when it came to targeted killings, and Romney said that if elected president he would continue the campaign of drone strikes that Obama had escalated. Fearing such a prospect, Obama officials raced during the final weeks before the election to implement clear rules in the event they were no longer holding the levers in the drone wars. The effort to codify the procedures of targeted killings revealed just how much the secret operations remained something of an ad hoc effort. Fundamental questions about who can be killed, where they can be killed, and when they can be killed still had not been answered. The pressure to answer those questions eased on November 6, 2012, when a decisive election ensured that President Obama would remain in office for another four years.
The effort to bring clarity
to the secret wars flagged.

A nation fatigued by the long, bloody, and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seemed, by the end of President Obama’s first term, little concerned about the government’s escalation of clandestine warfare. Quite the contrary. According to one poll conducted for Amy Zegart, of Stanford University, the country had, to a remarkable degree, become increasingly hawkish on counterterrorism matters. A large majority—69 percent of respondents—said
they supported the American government
secretly assassinating terrorists.

Targeted killings have made the CIA the indispensable agency for the Obama administration and have even improved the agency’s image on other matters. According to the same poll, 69 percent of respondents expressed confidence that American spy agencies had accurate information about what was happening inside Iran and North Korea. This was more than 20 points higher than a similar poll had found in 2005, when the CIA was being slammed for the botched assessments about Iraq’s weapons programs. Interestingly, the 2012 poll was conducted just months after North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il died—and
CIA officials hadn’t learned of his death
until it was announced several days later on North Korean television.

But gradually, the risks and opportunity costs of a muscle-bound CIA are becoming evident. After the CIA was surprised during the first weeks of the Arab Spring, the agency reassigned dozens of case officers and analysts to study what was happening in the Middle East and North Africa. And once again, the Obama administration also turned to CIA officers to play the role of soldiers rather than spies. As the revolution in Libya escalated into open civil war, the CIA sent paramilitary officers and private contractors to the country to establish contact with rebel groups and help ensure that the tons of machine guns and antiaircraft weapons flowing into Libya were channeled to the right rebel leaders. President Obama insisted that no American ground troops be used in the war to drive Gaddafi from power, relying instead on the formula that his administration had come to trust: drones, clandestine officers, and a cadre of contractors that had been empowered to use the Libyan rebels as a proxy army.

But the CIA had precious little real intelligence about the rebel groups, and some of the rebels that the United States had empowered in Libya turned against their patrons.

Just after 10
P.M.
on the evening of September 11, 2012, a small CIA base in Libya received a frantic call from the American diplomatic compound just a mile away, in a different part of Benghazi, the port city on the Mediterranean Sea in eastern Libya where the American government had established a beachhead after Muammar Gaddafi’s fall. The diplomatic compound was coming under fire, the State Department officer at the other end of the line said, and attackers carrying AK-47s
were beginning to stream through
the facility’s main gate. Already the mob had taken gasoline cans and set one of the buildings on the compound ablaze.

The operatives at the CIA base, who had come to Benghazi to try to prevent Gaddafi’s arsenal of shoulder-fired missiles from getting into the hands of the militant groups that had splintered off from the rebels now in charge in Libya, gathered their weapons and drove in a two-car convoy to the diplomatic compound. They had failed to convince a group of Libyan militia fighters to join them in the rescue effort, and when they arrived at the compound a fire was raging. J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, was trapped inside one of the buildings. The building’s ceiling had collapsed, and the CIA team was unable to reach Stevens, who suffocated from the intense smoke. Circling overhead, a military drone that had been diverted from a separate mission was beaming video of the firefight into the headquarters of U.S. Africa Command in Germany. But the Predator was unarmed and incapable of providing any help to the badly outnumbered team of Americans.