The Richard M. Helms Award dinner, held annually at a major Washington hotel, is among the highlights of the intelligence community’s social calendar. Hosted by the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, the event raises and distributes money to aid families of officers killed in action, whose sacrifice is commemorated in the rows of stars carved into the wall of the foyer at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The venue for the 2011 event, held on March 30, was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City, and as usual it attracted hundreds of intelligence luminaries, current and former. Joining them were senior executives of various defense corporations—Lockheed, SAIC, Booz Allen, General Atomics, and others—who had generously sponsored tables at the event.
There was much to celebrate. President Barack Obama, who had run a quasi-antiwar liberal campaign for the White House, had embraced the assassination program and had decreed, “the CIA gets what it wants.” Intelligence budgets were maintaining the steep upward curve that had started in 2001, and while all agencies were benefiting, none had done as well as the CIA. At just under $15 billion, the agency’s budget had climbed by 56 percent just since 2004.
Decades earlier, Richard Helms, the CIA director for whom the event was named, would customarily refer to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as “those bastards.” Such disdain for commerce in the world of spooks was now long gone, as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the Grand Ballroom that evening. The executives, many of whom had passed through the revolving door from government service, were there to rub shoulders with old friends and current partners. “It was totally garish,” one attendee told me afterward. “It seemed like every arms manufacturer in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business, right and left.”
In the decade since 9/11, the CIA had been regularly blighted by scandal—revelations of torture, renditions, secret “black site” prisons, bogus intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq, ignored signs of the impending 9/11 attacks—but such unwholesome realities found no echo in this comradely gathering. Even George Tenet, the CIA director who had presided over all of the aforementioned scandals, was greeted with heartfelt affection by erstwhile colleagues as he, along with almost every other living former CIA director, stood to be introduced by Master of Ceremonies John McLaughlin, a former deputy director himself deeply complicit in the Iraq fiasco. Each, with the exception of Stansfield Turner (still bitterly resented for downsizing the agency post-Vietnam), received ringing applause, but none more than the night’s honoree, former CIA director and then-current secretary of defense Robert M. Gates.
Although Gates had left the CIA eighteen years before, he was very much the father figure of the institution and a mentor to the intelligence chieftains, active and retired, who cheered him so fervently that night at the Ritz-Carlton. He had climbed through the ranks of the national security bureaucracy with a ruthless determination all too evident to those around him. Ray McGovern, his supervisor in his first agency post, as an analyst with the intelligence directorate’s soviet foreign policy branch, recalls writing in an efficiency report that the young man’s “evident and all-consuming ambition is a disruptive influence in the branch.” There had come a brief check on his rise to power when his involvement in the Iran-Contra imbroglio cratered an initial attempt to win confirmation as CIA director, but success came a few years later, in 1991, despite vehement protests from former colleagues over his persistent willingness to sacrifice analytic objectivity to the political convenience of his masters.
Gates’ successful 1991 confirmation as CIA chief owed much, so colleagues assessed, to diligent work behind the scenes on the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff director, George Tenet. In 1993, Tenet moved on to be director for intelligence programs on the Clinton White House national security staff, in which capacity he came to know and esteem John Brennan, a midlevel and hitherto undistinguished CIA analyst assigned to brief White House staffers. Tenet liked Brennan so much that when he himself moved to the CIA as deputy director in 1995, he had the briefer appointed station chief in Riyadh, an important position normally reserved for someone with actual operational experience. In this sensitive post Brennan worked tirelessly to avoid irritating his Saudi hosts, showing reluctance, for example, to press them for Osama bin Laden’s biographical details when asked to do so by the bin Laden unit back at headquarters.
Brennan returned to Washington in 1999 under Tenet’s patronage, initially as his chief of staff and then as CIA executive director, and by 2003 he had transitioned to the burgeoning field of intelligence fusion bureaucracy. The notion that the way to avert miscommunication between intelligence bureaucracies was to create yet more layers of bureaucracy was popular in Washington in the aftermath of 9/11. One concrete expression of this trend was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, known as T-TIC and then renamed the National Counterterrorism Center a year later. Brennan was the first head of T-TIC, distinguishing himself in catering to the abiding paranoia of the times. On one occasion, notorious within the community, he circulated an urgent report that al-Qaeda was encrypting targeting information for terrorist attacks in the broadcasts of the al-Jazeera TV network, thereby generating an “orange” alert and the cancellation of dozens of international flights. The initiative was greeted with malicious amusement over at the CIA’s own Counterterrorism Center, whose chief at the time, José Rodríguez, later opined that Brennan had been trying to build up his profile with higher authority. “Brennan was a major factor in keeping [the al-Jazeera/al-Qaeda story] alive. We thought it was ridiculous,” he told a reporter. “My own view is he saw this, he took this, as a way to have relevance, to take something to the White House.” Tellingly, an Obama White House spokesman later excused Brennan’s behavior on the grounds that though he had circulated the report, he hadn’t believed it himself.
Exiting government service in 2005, Brennan spent the next three years heading The Analysis Corporation, an obscure but profitable intelligence contractor engaged in preparing terrorist watch lists for the government, work for which he was paid $763,000 in 2008. Among the useful relationships he had cultivated over the years was well-connected Democrat Anthony Lake, a former national security adviser to Bill Clinton, who recommended him to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Meeting for the first time shortly after Obama’s election victory, the pair bonded immediately, with Obama “finishing Brennan’s sentences,” by one account. Among their points of wholehearted agreement was the merit of a surgical approach to terrorist threats, the “need to target the metastasizing disease without destroying the surrounding tissue,” as Brennan put it, for which drones and their Hellfire missiles seemed the ideal tools. Obama was initially balked in his desire to make Brennan CIA director because of the latter’s all-too-close association with the agency’s torture program, so instead the new president made him his assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, with an office down the hall from the Oval Office. Two years into the administration, everyone in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom knew that the bulky Irishman was the most powerful man in U.S. intelligence as the custodian of the president’s kill list, on which the chief executive and former constitutional law professor insisted on reserving the last word, making his final selections for execution at regularly scheduled Tuesday afternoon meetings. “You know, our president has his brutal side,” a CIA source cognizant of Obama’s involvement observed to me at the time.
Now, along with the other six hundred diners at the Helms dinner, Brennan listened attentively as Gates rose to accept the coveted award for “exemplary service to the nation and the Central Intelligence Agency.” After paying due tribute to previous honorees as well as his pride in being part of the CIA “family,” Gates spoke movingly of a recent and particularly tragic instance of CIA sacrifice, the seven men and women killed by a suicide bomber at an agency base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009. All present bowed their heads in silent tribute.
Gates then moved on to a more upbeat topic. When first he arrived at the Pentagon in 2007, he said, he had found deep-rooted resistance to “new technology” among “flyboys with silk scarves” still wedded to venerable traditions of fighter-plane combat. But all that, he informed his rapt audience, had changed. Factories were working “day and night, day and night,” to turn out the vital weapons for the fight against terrorism. “So from now on,” he concluded, his voice rising, “the watchword is: drones, baby, drones!”
The applause was long and loud.
Far away in a town in northwest Pakistan, two craters in a bus depot, some ruined buildings scorched by fire, and several dozen fresh graves in the neighborhood gave concrete illustration to Gates’ theme. Two weeks before, the leading lights of the district of Datta Khel, a scattered community on the edge of hills running to the Afghan border a few miles away, had met in a jirga, a community meeting to settle a thorny issue concerning mineral rights. A tribal elder, Malik Dawood, had recently bought the rights to harvest a large tract of oak trees. But while doing this he had noticed that the land contained chromite, used in making stainless steel and chrome and about the only natural resource in this poverty-stricken region, where annual income averages $250. Now he was in dispute with the owner of the land over his right to mine it. As is the custom in Pashtun culture, the dispute would be hashed out in two days of discussion among the local elders, most of whom were appointed and paid by the Pakistani government, which endorsed and supported the jirga system. Although the ominous buzz of drones was always in the air, the men had been confident enough of their innocent intent to notify the local army commander, Brigadier Abdullah Dogar, about the meeting well ahead of time. However, the land in question was in an area controlled by the Pakistani Taliban, who could therefore enforce whatever decision was reached at the jirga, and so four of them had been invited to the meeting.
Some of the tribesmen making their way on the morning of March 17, 2011, to the Nomada bus depot, an open space next to the bazaar in Datta Khel where the meeting was to be held, might have been dimly aware of events the day before in a courtroom in Lahore, several hundred miles to the east. None of them could have known about a related argument being waged over secure communications between the U.S. embassy in Islamabad and CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But the consequences of that argument would cost most of them their lives.
In Lahore, a burly American named Raymond Davis had been brought to trial for shooting and killing two men the previous January. Davis, a former Special Forces soldier inhabiting the murky world of public/private intelligence that had metastasized since 9/11, was under contract by the CIA (under diplomatic cover) to spy on the Pakistani government–sponsored Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group in Lahore, in which capacity he had gunned down the two men under circumstances that remain obscure. The killing had generated outrage across Pakistan, exacerbated as far as the government and the powerful military ISI spy agency were concerned by CIA Director Leon Panetta’s straightforward lies regarding his agency’s connection to Davis. Davis had seemed ripe for the gallows until a quiet deal negotiated by U.S. Ambassador Cameron Munter had secured “forgiveness” by his victims’ relatives in a dramatic courtroom scene, in return for CIA payments totaling $2.34 million in diyat, blood money.
The CIA, already bitter at the Pakistanis for keeping Davis in prison for seven weeks, hated having to agree to the deal. Now, with their man safely out of the country, the agency was determined to demonstrate their anger by launching a convincing drone strike. The man they selected to kill was Sherabat Khan Wazir, a commander in what Pakistani intelligence deemed the “good” Taliban because they focused their energies on fighting the Americans across the border in Afghanistan, while maintaining cordial relations with the government and military in Islamabad. Targeting an important Pakistani ally would be satisfactory payback for the humiliation of Davis’ incarceration, not to mention the $2.34 million. “It was in retaliation for Davis,” a U.S. diplomat told AP reporter Kathy Gannon. “The CIA was angry.”
Ambassador Munter thought this was a terrible idea and said so in an urgent cable to the State Department in Washington, which relayed his plea to CIA Director Leon Panetta. Panetta, a career politician and part-time walnut farmer appointed CIA chief by Obama in 2009, had become instantly partisan on behalf of the institution. “He embraced [the institution] with both arms,” an official with whom he worked closely told me. Panetta straightforwardly rejected Munter’s advice. Brennan, the ultimate controlling authority for CIA strikes, did not intervene.
So, when Sherabat climbed into a car with three of his followers on the morning of March 17 and set off for the jirga, he was under the scrutiny of at least two CIA drones. It would have been feasible to strike the car while en route, and indeed this was a routine drone strike tactic. Just six days earlier, for example, there had been two separate attacks on two cars, one of which had employed another favored CIA drone tactic, the “double tap,” in which a second missile is reserved for rescuers, and had killed eight people. But the targeters at Langley and the pilots in Nevada (CIA drones are flown by air force personnel at Creech Air Force Base) held off. They were awaiting a more lucrative target—the crowd of men converging on the bus depot to which the car was headed. After all, it was an established point of drone-strike doctrine that any “military aged male” (from thirteen up) in the company of terrorists could themselves be deemed a terrorist in the absence of explicit intelligence to the contrary.
Finally, sometime after 10:00 a.m., the Taliban contingent arrived, and the meeting began. About forty-five men were sitting in two circles twenty feet apart. They must have made an inviting target, for the two impact craters left in the rocky ground of the bus parking lot from the Hellfire missiles that began landing around 10:45 appear to have been in the center of those circles. The blasts were especially lethal, thanks to the pieces of rock flung up by the blasts. Given the sixty-foot blast radius of a Hellfire, it is hard to see how anyone at the meeting could have survived. One gray-haired elder, Ahmed Jan, who was thrown twenty feet and knocked unconscious, later recalled the hissing sound the first missile had made as it zeroed in. A local man who arrived at the scene a few minutes after the blasts described later how “the tribal elders killed in the blast could not be identified because there were body parts strewn about. The smell was awful.” The buildings bordering the area continued to burn for two days.
Subsequent investigations by journalists and human rights organizations indicate that forty-four people, one of them possibly a child, died in the strike. There was an immediate and unusually furious reaction from Pakistani leaders. General Ashfaq Kayani, the all-powerful army chief, announced that the jirga had been “carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life.” The country’s foreign office called it “not only unacceptable but also a flagrant violation of all humanitarian rules and norms,” while the local governor called the dead “martyrs.” The particular vehemence of the protests led some on the American side to believe that they had killed more than just elders and a few Taliban. “From the body language [of senior Pakistani commanders] I concluded there had been ISI people at that meeting,” one official told me.
The United States, however, was and remains adamant that every single one of the victims deserved his fate. As one U.S. government official explained, the group targeted was heavily armed, some of its members were connected to al-Qaeda, and all ‘acted in a manner consistent with AQ [al-Qaeda]-linked militants.’” “These guys were terrorists, not the local men’s glee club,” another declared confidently. But researchers for the Stanford and New York University Law School, after conducting in-depth interviews with witnesses, survivors, and family members, concluded that the victims had indeed been mostly civilians. A separate probe by the Associated Press came to the same conclusion, putting the number of dead at forty-four.
Drone partisans customarily hail the surgical precision of these weapons. But in terms of effects this strike was not surgical at all, cutting a wide and indiscriminate swath through local society. Most of the dead men were on the Pakistani government payroll as designated tribal leaders or auxiliary policemen. Their salaries supported extended families. Malik Daud Khan, for example, the man who convened the jirga, was an official liaison between the government and all the tribes of North Waziristan. His pay, considered adequate for a “decent family,” supported not only his six sons but also the sons of his brothers. Another petty official, Ismail Khan, left behind a family of eight, only two of which were sons old enough to find work of any kind. Although the positions held by the dead men were now of course vacant, they were reserved, as officials in the region explained, for elders with “experience and years of wisdom,” which their sons could not supply.
It had been the 202nd drone strike of the Obama presidency, the 248th (outside of Afghanistan) by the CIA since an agency-directed missile had hit a car in Marib, Yemen, on November 3, 2002, and killed six people, one of whom was an American. Much had changed since those early days, most fundamentally the acceptance by Americans that their premier intelligence agency’s principal occupation had become assassination.
Allegedly, the CIA had entered reluctantly into the business. When presented with the tool of a Hellfire-armed Predator, George Tenet is said to have demurred, telling a National Security Council meeting that it would be a “terrible mistake” for the director of Central Intelligence to fire such a weapon and that it would happen only “over his dead body.” Tenet, a deft bureaucratic politician, may have had in mind the political earthquake that hit the agency following the assassination program revelations of the 1970s. In any event, his rejection did not last long. “He was the Director of Central Intelligence, he could have refused to use it,” a former senior agency official pointed out to me. “And if they had ordered him to do it, he could have quit.”
Of course, Tenet did not quit. Soon, visiting dignitaries from friendly allied intelligence agencies were being treated to exclusive viewings of lethal drone strikes in Afghanistan at CIA headquarters. In the early years, when the strikes were almost entirely against targets in Afghanistan, the line between CIA and military operations was blurred. Thus it was a CIA-controlled Predator that the JSOC Task Force commanders in Oman used to try and run the firefight on Takur Gar Mountain during Operation Anaconda. This was in part due to the fact that two separate arms of the agency were vying for control of the new weapon. One was the Counterterrorism Center. The other was the Special Activities Division, the agency’s paramilitary arm, whose personnel were largely drawn from the army or other of the military services. The division did not necessarily rank high in status among other elements of the intelligence community. “[They were] generally people who washed out from the military,” sniffed one former senior official. “Knuckle-draggers,” carped another. With such views circulating, it was not surprising that the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) emerged from the tussle with exclusive control of the Predator fleet.
Now that they owned the remote-killing weapon system, the agency had to gain waivers from target countries in order to use it. In 2004, when the CIA sought Pakistani permission to launch drone strikes in Pakistan, the price was the head of a militant young tribal strongman in Waziristan named Nek Muhammed Wazir who had infuriated the Pakistani military by repeatedly breaking truce agreements and humiliating forces sent to capture him—an early stage in the slow-burning Pashtun insurgency against Islamabad. Easily located thanks to his penchant for giving radio interviews via satellite phone, he was duly dispatched with a Hellfire on June 18, 2004, along with a number of fellow militants and two youths, aged sixteen and ten. By agreement, the Pakistanis took credit for the strike. Thereafter, the CIA was cleared to seek out victims but with restrictions. Only precisely identified high-value targets were to be hit, and there were to be no civilian casualties.
Compared to what was to come, strikes in the early years in Pakistan were few and far between, a mere eleven between 2004 and the beginning of 2008. Nor was the tally of high-value targets impressive: one in 2004 (Nek Muhammed), two the following year, and two the year after that. There were none in 2007. Civilians, on the other hand, fared less well, with as many as 121 civilians, 82 of whom were accounted for in a single misconceived attack in 2006 on a madrassa, a religious school, in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. In keeping with agreed procedure, both U.S. and Pakistani spokesmen lied briskly, denying any American involvement. “It was completely done by the Pakistani military,” a U.S. military spokesman told reporters in Kabul, while a Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman claimed, “It is something that we have done and we have been doing for peace and security in our own region.” Within a week, a suicide bomber struck at a Pakistani police barracks near Islamabad, killing 42 and wounding 20. It was a lesson to the Pakistani government that collusion with drone strikes could bring unpleasant aftereffects.
Meanwhile, despite the low-rate campaign, back at home the CIA was bolstering the assassination bureaucracy embedded in the Counterterrorism Center. As noted, the center, despite its lamentable performance prior to 9/11, had emerged from the disaster as “the most powerful institution in the country.” Cofer Black, its director at the time of the attacks, had endeared himself to President Bush with macho boasts that the attackers would soon “have flies crawling across their eyeballs” as he supervised the CIA’s descent into torture and rendition. His peers at the agency, concluding that Cofer was “out of control,” as one recalled to me, hoped that appointing José Rodríguez, deemed to be “more responsible,” as his deputy would compel some restraint on the theatrical Black. But Rodríguez, who took over as director when Black departed in 2002, was soon exhibiting the same behavior as Black, later becoming notorious as the principal apologist for torture. “Is Cofer some sort of vampire?” asked an exasperated senior official at the time. “Does he bite people and then they become like him?” Rodríguez was in turn succeeded in 2004 by a more polished agency veteran, Robert Grenier, who might be deemed an exception to the pattern since he was fired in 2006, reportedly for his opposition to prevailing policies on torture and rendition. But his opposition to torture was qualified. As he later wrote, “… the fact is that I supported continued use of harsh interrogation methods—notably excluding waterboarding” and cited “the clear effectiveness of our interrogation program.” (He was writing as part of a concerted campaign by former senior officials to denounce and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA torture program.) “Grenier was never really against torture,” one of his former colleagues remarked to me. “He just didn’t think it was being done the right way.”
The rapid turnover ended with Grenier’s successor. Appointed in 2006, “Mike”—he chose to remain undercover and therefore, given the proclivity of the Obama Administration for prosecuting journalists, it seems wiser to omit his widely-known full name—was still in the post eight years later. Notoriously harsh on subordinates, “Mike” lived a monkish existence, rarely leaving his office, even to sleep (he kept a foldaway bed there), except to smoke in the courtyard. He retained the Shia faith adopted on his marriage to a Shia during an overseas posting earlier in his career. “As I understand it, she was pretty relaxed about the rules on alcohol and so on,” a former colleague recalled. “But he takes them more seriously than she ever did.”
By common agreement among insiders, he was the unrelenting champion of the drone assassination program, successfully quashing any and all attempts to restrain it. His immense power rested in large part on his skills as a political operator, which enabled him to survive attempts by various CIA directors under whom he served to dismiss him. “They’ve tried several times,” a former senior agency official who worked with “Mike” told me. “But each time he goes to his allies in the White House and Capitol Hill, and it stops.”
“I’ve had a lot of run-ins with the CIA; most of their people are pretty reasonable to deal with,” a former State Department official told me. “But not that guy. He’s scary.”
At a time when America’s drone war generated ever-mounting comment and condemnation, very few people outside the innermost circles of the counterterrorist bureaucracy understood that the war was being directed by this strange, devout recluse, his influence indirectly reflected in headlines and graveyards far from Washington.
By 2011 the Counterterrorism Center accounted for 10 percent of the agency’s entire workforce and occupied a large portion of available floor space at CIA headquarters, including a whole department assigned specifically to Pakistan and Afghanistan. (For public consumption, Alec Station, the unit set up in 1996 to hunt Osama bin Laden, was abolished in 2006. In fact, it was merely renamed but still dedicated to the pursuit of the number-one target.)
Most significantly, one in every five of the agency’s intelligence analysts was now a targeter. Setting this development in stone in 2006, the agency designated targeting as a distinct career track, meaning that employees could garner raises and promotions without ever leaving the targeting field. This specialty had originally been conceived as devoted to the recruitment of agents. “There was an acronym we used,” a former agency official who helped develop the program told me. “‘SPADR,’ which stood for Spot, Assess, Develop, Recruit. We spent years getting the bureaucracy to approve it as a career track, and it came in just in time when we needed people to spot targets for strikes. It was the same skills. We’re not thinking about bloodthirsty butchers,” he cautioned, “these were ordinary people, soccer moms, who would come in to work on their vacations because they felt they were ‘saving lives.’”
The budget for this inexorably expanding machine was a closely held secret, but by comparison, the FBI’s spending for counterterrorist operations in 2010 was $3.1 billion. Naturally, a multibillion-dollar budget needed more than two or three strikes a year in end results, but with irksome restrictions on hitting only clearly identified high-value targets, not to mention avoiding civilians, this would be hard to achieve. So it was in July 2008 that CIA Director Michael Hayden, a former air force intelligence general who came to the agency after heading NSA, went to the White House to make the case for a little loosening of the rules, as forcefully demanded by “Mike,” the powerful counterterror chief. With him went his deputy, Stephen Kappes.
The pair knew just which buttons to press. Al-Qaeda, they told President Bush and his senior national security staff, had regrouped and was massing in the lawless frontier of northwest Pakistan. Despite the isolation of their lair, the “network” was weaving plots to strike across the globe. “After the next attack,” warned Hayden, “knowing what we know now, there’s no explaining it if we don’t do something.” Recounting his triumph afterward, the spy chief explained how he and Kappes “kept building and building the case of the safe havens. They were coming at us. They were a threat to the homeland.” In other words, as in every war since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia—the target list had to be expanded, after which victory would be assured.
It was an easy sell. Bush rapidly agreed that henceforth the CIA could launch attacks with only the briefest warning to the Pakistanis. But Bush also gave his assent to an astonishingly far-reaching change. Henceforth, it would no longer be necessary to identify the target. Merely looking like a terrorist would be sufficient to trigger a strike. From now on, people could be killed on the basis of their behavior, as detected by various sensors: the unblinking eyes of the Predators and Reapers or the ears of the phone-monitoring networks of the NSA. Thus the notorious “signature strike” based on “patterns of life” was officially sanctified.
Forty years earlier, when Hayden had been a very junior air force officer, the targeters of Task Force Alpha had relied on sensors scattered throughout the Laotian jungles to detect patterns, such as a sequence of engine noises and slight earth movements that denoted an enemy truck convoy or urine smells and scattered conversations that might indicate a column of troops. After four decades the theater had shifted from dense jungle to the barren hills of the northwest frontier, but the concept was the same: a belief that enemy behavior was so well understood that the targeters knew what to look for, such as the unique features of an al-Qaeda convoy or a terrorist meeting or a particular pattern of phone calls. Once a telltale pattern was detected, the target could be destroyed without further investigation. As with the Predator pilot who thought that washing and praying at dawn was a sure Taliban giveaway, the accuracy of the pattern was all-important. Among the elements that could combine for a lethal signature was a man’s mode of urinating. Someone informed the targeters that while Pashtun men urinate standing up, Arab men squat. This then became a means of identifying Arab al-Qaeda otherwise indistinguishable from their Pashtun colleagues and was duly incorporated in the targeting algorithms.
The immediate effects of Hayden’s successful solicitation were dramatic. Drone strikes on the frontier took off, with thirty-two in the second half of 2009 alone. Then, as of January 20, 2009, a new commander in the drone wars appeared. Though the idealistic youths who had campaigned so hard for him in his presidential run may not have noticed, Barack Obama had quietly signaled early in his campaign that his view on high-value targeting was entirely orthodox. “It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005,” he told a Washington think-tank audience in August 2007, referring to a planned SEAL commando raid on an alleged high-level enemy meeting in Waziristan, aborted at the last minute by Donald Rumsfeld. Interestingly, these bellicose remarks were guided by Richard Clarke, the Clinton-era “terror czar” who had lobbied forcefully for the development of the lethal Predator drone. Those national security insiders who took solace in the candidate’s militant stance would not be disappointed.
On January 23, 2009, just three days after Obama was inaugurated, two separate drone strikes in North and South Waziristan authorized by the new president and relayed via John Brennan killed up to twenty-five people, including possibly as many as twenty civilians. Neither strike hit its intended high-value targets. The second killed a local elder and member of a progovernment peace committee named Malik Gukistan Khan along with four members of his family. Khan’s brother later told human rights researchers from Columbia Law School, “We did nothing, have no connection to militants at all. Our family supported the government … no one has accepted responsibility for this incident so far.” Some in Washington took a cynical view of the CIA’s eagerness to involve the new president in a strike. “He’s been blooded, just like you would a hunting dog,” a former White House official remarked to me at the time. Afterward, when Hayden and Kappes explained the concept of a signature strike—targeting people who look like terrorists—to the chief executive, Obama reportedly snapped, “That’s not good enough for me.” But he authorized them to continue all the same.
The strikes not only continued, they doubled and redoubled. There were 52 in all of 2009 and 128 in 2010. According to a rare outside observer, the New York Times journalist David Rhode, held hostage in North Waziristan between November 2008 and June 2009, life became “hell on earth.” After 7 months in captivity, he recalled the terror of life under drones: “From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.”
Under the onslaught, patterns of life began to change. People, for example, tried not to gather in large groups, fearful of displaying a potentially lethal signature. Following the attack on the jirga at Datta Khel, this form of community activity, integral to tribal culture, fell into disuse. Wedding parties, one of the few forms of social entertainment permitted in this straitlaced society, also disappeared. A relative of one of the March 17 victims later described how “We do not come out of our villages because it’s very dangerous to go out anywhere.… In past we used to participate in activities like wedding gatherings [and] different kinds of jirgas, different kinds of funerals.… We used to go to different houses for condolences, and there were all kinds of activities in the past and we used to participate. But now it’s a risk to go to any place or participate in any activities.”
Back in Washington, the administration maintained stoutly that civilian casualties were nonexistent or minimal (though of course death by drone for a military-aged male brought involuntary posthumous enlistment, according to U.S. methodology, as a “militant”). No remotely objective tabulation of the civilian death count in the Obama years has suggested that the drones were killing more civilians than al-Qaeda or Taliban members, but the ordinary inhabitants in the kill zone of the tribal territories clearly understood that the strikes were not precise, that anyone could unwittingly display the wrong signature. Had the drones struck only “deserving” targets, innocents would have known that and gone happily to their neighbors’ weddings and funerals without fear.
Drone partisans naturally hailed the universal precision of their weapons. As David Deptula said to me, “We can now hit any target anywhere in the world, any time, any weather, day or night.” Strikes were certainly a perfect instrument of effects-based operations in removing the terrorists of various descriptions who lurked in the midst of tribal society. But the effects of hundreds of strikes, concentrated in an area the size of Maryland, were anything but precise. In fact, they devastated the life of the society as comprehensively as if it had been subjected to a World War II–style carpet bombing but in ways that would be invisible to distant spectators peering at their Predator feeds. Thus the “double-tap” tactic of reserving a second missile for rescuers converging to help victims of an initial strike put a crimp on the generosity of ordinary citizens, not to mention the Red Cross, which ordered its people to stay away from a house or car hit by drones for at least six hours. The sole survivor of Obama’s first strike, a youth named Faheem Qureshi, felt that he survived only because he was able to walk out of the burning house on his own; none of his neighbors would have dared approach. Similarly, because there have been strikes on funerals, people are wary of funeral processions and other ceremonies of collective grieving. In a further general effect on the population at large, the cost of travel and shipping goods soared as truck and taxi drivers grew fearful of the risks of being hit on the road.
Meanwhile, the increased rate of drone strikes inside Pakistan from mid-2008 was not due solely to the advent of signature strikes. The growing scale of the Tehrik-i-Taliban—the Pakistani Taliban known as TTP—insurgency against the government in Islamabad encouraged the Pakistanis to solicit further U.S. help in eliminating their domestic enemies. In return, they were prepared to assist in targeting what they considered “good” Taliban groups that reserved their energies for attacking Americans in Afghanistan. At the same time, by dint of unstinting effort and large amounts of cash, the CIA had recruited agents among the tribal populations of Waziristan to assist them in nominating and locating targets. Combining traditional spy craft with modern technology, at least some of these agents were equipped with a geolocation device (really just a SIM card with a transmitter) that could be used by a drone for targeting purposes. Clearly, whoever possessed one of these devices held the power of life and death over anyone they chose. They could plant it in the home of an al-Qaeda terrorist or that of a neighbor with whom they were on bad terms. The drones need not discriminate. However many of the devices were actually deployed, their existence naturally induced paranoia among a population fearful that an argument over a broken fence or the price of a sheep might bring a missile down on their heads.
Quite apart from such neighborly differences, the empowerment of local agents to call in a strike put a powerful weapon in the hands of two rival tribes in Waziristan, the Mehsud and the Wazirs. The Mehsud, hailing from South Waziristan and so ferocious even by local standards that the British had dubbed them “wolves,” fell into open warfare with the Pakistani state and pursued an unbridled campaign of bombings, shootings, and beheadings across the country in the name of the TTP. Meanwhile, their rivals, the Wazirs, in North Waziristan, were at peace with the Pakistani government and were primarily concerned with assisting their tribal brethren fighting the Americans across the border in Afghanistan. Thus the CIA targeters were less interested in the Mehsud, until, that is, a routine NSA phone intercept in May 2009 picked up someone discussing the fact that Baitullah Mehsud, the vicious, semiliterate, but capable thug who had created and led the TTP, had a nuclear weapon. When another conversation on the topic of Islamic doctrine regarding the use of such weapons surfaced, Washington went into (secret) convulsions. Even when it was concluded that the device was merely a “dirty bomb”—radioactive nuclear waste wrapped around explosives—the level of hysteria remained high. “We got played all the time,” a former CIA operations officer told me. “All the other side had to do was to have a conversation on the phone talking in some kind of mysterious code about an upcoming ‘wedding party’ and we’d go on red alert.”
Naturally, the Pakistani government was happy to encourage the newfound U.S. antipathy toward Baitullah Mehsud, who only two months before had attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team and a police academy in Lahore in retaliation, he announced, “for U.S. missile strikes off drones inside the Pakistan territory.” A crafty initial attempt on June 23, 2009, to kill Mehsud by first killing a subordinate in the expectation he would attend the funeral, which was duly struck with three missiles, proved disappointing. Some sixty people were killed, including a number of children, but not Baitullah Mehsud. In August a second attempt that caught him on his roof having his feet massaged by his young wife proved more successful. Obama called the targeter to congratulate her.
Baitullah’s successor as leader of the Pakistani Taliban was his charismatic and more capable cousin Hakimullah. Baitullah had been nurturing a Jordanian jihadi doctor and blogger named Humam Balawi, who had convinced Jordanian intelligence, and by extension the CIA, that he was a double agent prepared to spy on al-Qaeda, whereas his true loyalties remained fervently jihadist. The CIA at the highest levels, especially “Mike,” was so excited by the possibility of finally having an agent inside the terrorist group, that the news was hurried all the way to the Oval Office. Their focus fixed on head-hunting rather than intelligence, the agency’s most fervent desire was that Balawi would lead them to a really high-value target, Ayman al-Zawahiri, number two on the list after Osama bin Laden, whom they could thereupon locate and kill.
As related in Joby Warrick’s gripping account of the Balawi affair, Baitullah had cunningly bolstered Balawi’s credentials by having him notify the agency that the Taliban leader would be traveling in a particular car on a specific day. In reality the driver of the car, duly destroyed by a drone-launched missile, was a sacrificial lamb deployed by Mehsud to convince the Americans that Balawi was on the level. The scheme worked; excitement in Washington over this potentially priceless asset grew more fevered. Balawi was now tasked by Hakimullah, along with various al-Qaeda leaders lurking in the area, to manipulate the CIA into inviting him to meet them at their heavily guarded base at Khost, just inside the Afghan border, a way station for collecting human intelligence used to target drone strikes. Tragically, the plan succeeded. All normal security procedures were waived, and on December 30, 2009, Balawi was welcomed to the base by a throng of CIA officers and contract employees, led by base commander Jennifer Matthews, a veteran of the CTC’s Alec Station who had spent the intervening years trying to live down the unit’s pre-9/11 errors. Unfortunately, Balawi was wearing a suicide vest packed with thirty pounds of C4 explosive provided by his real masters, which he detonated on arrival, immolating seven CIA personnel in a massive explosion.
The Mehsud clan and their al-Qaeda allies had extracted a bloody revenge for relatives and comrades blown apart by drones. The Khost attack was, by any standard, a very successful high-value targeting operation. Hakimullah proudly claimed credit for avenging cousin Baitullah, posting a video online of himself conferring with Balawi shortly before the bombing. But now they, too, would discover the inevitable result of a high-value target elimination as they themselves were subjected to a hail of Hellfires: eleven strikes over the next three weeks, killing at least sixty-two people. One attack in particular generated the highest hopes at Langley and the White House: a phone intercept had located Hakimullah Mehsud himself at an abandoned madrassa that was immediately attacked. Celebrations followed initial reports that Hakimullah had been struck down, but the intelligence was false. The Taliban leader had survived. A second attempt the following year also failed.
Whatever higher purpose they may have had in mind, and notwithstanding their futuristic apparatus of remote split operations, streaming infrared videos, and social-network analytics, the CIA’s drone warriors were now embroiled in an old-fashioned tribal blood feud. In fact, given reports that the rival Mehsud and Wazir tribes were settling scores by identifying each other to the CIA as terrorist targets, the agency was being employed in more than one such feud. “It was like inmate politics,” one official in close touch with the drone program commented to me, “gangs settling scores in the prison yard with knives.”
The intense fusillade of drone-launched missiles continued, roughly 1 every 3 days in 2010 (117 overall), but drone strikes declined to half that rate in the following year. Confusingly, although the majority of strikes were now aimed at Pakistan’s allies, the so-called good Taliban at peace with Islamabad while at war in Afghanistan, ISI (Pakistani military intelligence) claimed to a Western journalist in the spring of 2010 that they were supplying the targeting information for all drone strikes. In this Machiavellian environment, ISI, intent on regaining the control of Afghanistan it had lost in 2001, was playing a devious game. “Hitting the Haqqanis and other groups that were allied with Pakistan helped ISI keep them under control,” a former adviser to the U.S. military commanders in Kabul pointed out to me. “They could tell them ‘do what we want in Afghanistan, or we’ll have the Americans drone you.’” Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s brother, laid out the facts of life to a U.S. official in February 2010, according to a classified cable published by Wikileaks, telling him that “some Afghan (Taliban) commanders … are told by the Pakistanis that they must continue to fight or they will be turned over to the coalition.”
On November 1, 2013, after another failed attempt, the CIA finally caught up with Hakimullah Mehsud, dispatching him with a drone strike. Though this was satisfying revenge for Khost, the killing also sabotaged nascent peace negotiations between the Pakistani Taliban and the Pakistani government, which had been due to start the following day. Among other “second-order effects,” the killing increased the power of Mehsud’s tribal rivals, the Haqqanis, the group that was busy spearheading the insurgency and killing Americans in eastern Afghanistan. It also goes without saying that the killing of Hakimullah yet again verified the rule that elimination of a high-value target leads to someone worse, since the next leader of the Pakistani Taliban was none other than Maulana Fazlullah, known locally as “Mullah Radio” for his use of that medium when pronouncing beheadings for sundry infractions of sharia law such as polio vaccinations. Fazlullah, furthermore, had commissioned the infamous shooting of fifteen-year-old schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in response to her campaign for female education. Unfortunately, apart from his psychopathic zealotry, Fazlullah proved to be a capable and efficient commander, orchestrating further mayhem across Pakistan in revenge, he said, for Pakistani complicity in the U.S. strike on Hakimullah.
Amid the mayhem, President Obama still gamely insisted that the strikes had been “very precise precision [sic] strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta echoed the sentiment, calling the drone strikes “the most precise campaign in the history of warfare.” Two months after the strike on the Datta Khel jirga that killed over thirty civilians, John Brennan insisted that there had not been “a single collateral [civilian] death because of the exceptional precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
Sooner or later, U.S. officials and diplomats toiling to implement what they believed was American policy came to realize that there was really only one issue at stake: the domestic U.S. political fortunes of the Obama administration. “‘No bombs on my watch,’ that’s all they wanted to be able to say,” explained one former Obama White House official to me. “Drones were a cheap, politically painless way of dealing with that. No one even talked about it very much.” Cameron Munter, ambassador to Pakistan from 2010 to 2012, recalled to me how, during visits to the region by a top White House official, an ardent drone champion, he would try and explain how there might be some political drawbacks in the drone campaign for the U.S. vis-à-vis Pakistan. “[The official] would look at me with a mixture of sympathy and pity, as if to say ‘I understand U.S. domestic politics and you don’t.’”
John Brennan did like to put a “strategic” gloss on the undertaking, explaining at meetings, according to the former White House official, how al-Qaeda was “like a table, and when you cut off the legs of a table, the table falls.” Michael Morrell, the CIA’s deputy and sometime acting director, on the other hand, appeared less interested in the theory of high-value targeting. Instead, he tended to wax emotional about the need to use the drones to help American troops fighting on the other side of the border. “He had religion on this,” recalled the former official.
Despite Brennan’s theorizing about table legs, the hard-and-fast arithmetic of the northwest frontier, as revealed in leaked intelligence numbers, suggested that the strikes, whomever they hit, were having little effect on the al-Qaeda leadership. In the years 2006 to 2008 and the 12 months from September 2010, a mere 6 senior al-Qaeda leaders were struck. Of the 482 people listed in the leaked assessments as killed, 265—over half—were categorized as “non–al-Qaeda,” Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban, and unknowns. Just under half of the total strikes were aimed at these non–al-Qaeda targets. The Haqqani network, Pakistan’s friends fighting the Americans, got hit with 15 strikes, while their enemy, the TTP, who were generally fighting the Pakistanis, suffered 9 strikes. No one was quite sure how many civilians had died in the middle of all this or who should even be counted as a civilian. By 2012, for example, the CIA had clearance to treat armed men traveling by truck toward Pakistan, in a country where a gun is an article of clothing, as a “pattern of life” worthy of a lethal strike, the dead being counted as “militants.” Nor could some civilian deaths ever be counted, given that Pashtun men consider it inappropriate for outsiders even to know of the existence, let alone the names, of women in their strictly segregated households. So near neighbors might not know how many women and female children could be lying under the rubble of a strike, doomed to be forever anonymous.
It is worth bearing in mind that Pakistan, in the form of its ISI intelligence agency, was the dominant influence on the Afghan Taliban, its proxies in the campaign to reacquire Pakistan’s control of Afghanistan lost in 2001. The majority of CIA strikes in Pakistan were aimed not at the remaining senior al-Qaeda leadership lurking in Waziristan, who in any case had little capability to threaten U.S. interests, but at the Taliban, who were fighting and killing Americans in Afghanistan. However, drone strikes in Pakistan required the cooperation of the Pakistanis, not merely their permission to bomb their country without being shot down but also their intelligence help in finding targets.
Strikes on the Pakistani Taliban waging their war against the Pakistani state, largely stemming from the CIA’s urge to settle scores in its feud, meanwhile engendered retaliatory attacks inside Pakistan. As security deteriorated in the politically fragile but nuclear-armed country, the danger that the militant Islamists might actually gain power and control of a nuclear arsenal became more real. Given that this was Washington’s very worst nightmare, the CIA may not exactly have been acting in the U.S. national interest. “The drone campaign only makes sense,” a former civilian adviser to the U.S. military command in Kabul remarked to me as we discussed this surreal scenario, “if you assume that the entire objective of the operation so far as the CIA was concerned was to continue the drone strikes. The operation became an end in itself.” Given the burgeoning intelligence budgets, this was of course an entirely logical position from the agency’s point of view.
Ironically, after years of experience in managing a remote-killing campaign that depended on questionable intelligence, involved allies who were themselves in an equivocal relationship with the targets, and caused extensive collateral damage while traumatizing an entire society, Washington moved to duplicate the effort elsewhere.
* * *
The November 3, 2002, killing of Qa’id Salim Sinan al-Harithi, a leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen (and one of the reputed masterminds of the attack on the USS Cole), in Marib, a district about a hundred miles east of Yemen’s capital Sana’a, by a drone-fired missile was notable on several accounts. It was the first assassination by drone in a country with which the United States was not at war (unlike the Afghan hits). In those more innocent days this was cause for shock to many people, including Asma Jahangir, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, who thought the development “truly disturbing.” Officially, the killing was entirely the work of the Yemeni government, but Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz bragged on CNN about a “very successful tactical operation” by the CIA. The strike also broke new ground, in that it was the first remote-control summary execution without trial of an American citizen. Kamal Derwish, from Buffalo, New York, Harithi’s assistant, was riding in the car with him when the missile hit. In addition, coming a year and a half before the CIA obliged the Pakistanis by killing Nek Muhammed Wazir, it may also have been the first time a drone strike was put in service of local political machinations.
According to a cable later published by Wikileaks, Edmund Hull, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, told a visiting human rights delegation that “the action was taken in full cooperation with the ROYG [Republic of Yemen Government], against known al-Qaida operatives after previous attempts to apprehend the terrorists left eighteen Yemenis dead.” That statement was true as far as it went, and Ambassador Hull may have sincerely believed that the Yemeni government had suffered heavy casualties while making a good-faith effort to arrest Harethi. But Yemenis versed in the labyrinthine and devious politics of their country knew better.
Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s cunning and corrupt dictator since 1978, had long had an alliance of convenience with Yemeni Jihadis, a group nurtured by the Saudis and the CIA in the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s. They had provided crucial support for his crushing of South Yemeni independence in 1994, and remained an important if unacknowledged element of his ruling coalition, enjoying support and funds from Saudi Arabia. For example, Majeed al-Zindani, an extremist Yemeni cleric who had been Osama bin Laden’s spiritual mentor and who exercised enormous influence in Yemen, including but not limited to supervision of the Yemeni school syllabus, had long enjoyed Saleh’s favor and protection. (He has also laid claims to some striking scientific breakthroughs, including the discovery of cures for hepatitis and AIDS using “natural herbal compounds.”) Though placed on the State Department’s list of Designated Global Terrorists in 2004, Zindani lived openly in Sana’a as head of Imam University, which was founded with Yemeni government and Saudi financial support. Imam U. was the alma mater of, among others, the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. Anwar al-Awlaki, the Islamist cleric destined to be the second American citizen killed by a drone, was also on its faculty for a period. Zindani was a cofounder of the Islah party, the Islamist group headed by the tribal leader Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, the second most powerful man in the country. These allies, and others of like mind, were key, in Saleh’s view, to maintaining his grip on power and fending off the threat of secession by South Yemen, an independent Marxist state until 1990.
On the other hand, it was also important for Saleh to retain the support of Washington, which was anxious to see the al-Qaeda members in Yemen either in their graves or at least under lock and key. Saleh’s challenge therefore was to cooperate with the United States while avoiding any serious confrontation with al-Qaeda and thus remain in power and enlarge his already colossal fortune. (According to an eyewitness, Saleh, who was distrustful of banks, kept a large portion of his money in cash—hundreds of millions of dollars—stacked on pallets secreted in the basement of his palace.) When he had first seized power in a 1978 coup that followed several other short-lived coups, the expatriate community in Sana’a had held a sweepstake on how long he would last. The winning ticket had been “at least six weeks.” Saleh’s endurance was a tribute to his unscrupulous mastery of Yemeni tribal politics in all their infinite complexity.
On December 18, 2001, a force of Yemeni soldiers approached al-Hosun, a village in Marib Province, the reputed lair of al-Harithi, the al-Qaeda leader. But before they got anywhere near their target, the troops came under a hail of gunfire. Eighteen were killed and several wounded, the rest being surrounded and effectively held hostage until negotiations with local tribal sheikhs secured their release. Well-informed political sources in Sana’a told me on several occasions that there was more to the story than that, as is usually the case in Yemen. “Neither the military expedition nor the claim that they could not get al-Harithi can be taken at face value,” I was told. “Saleh dispatched the military mission to al-Huson, and Shaykh al-Ahmar (Saleh’s ally) sent his men to ambush the soldiers. When the soldiers got to al-Huson, they met no resistance at all. As they exited the town, there was a massive attack from the sand dunes just outside.” Thus, by this account, Saleh could convincingly demonstrate to Washington that the wanted terrorists, despite his tireless efforts, were well out of his reach.
Following the successful al-Harithi strike, the skies of Yemen were quiet for several years. From Saleh’s point of view they became perhaps a little too quiet, as a lull in al-Qaeda activity led to a cut in U.S. aid and irksome lectures from visiting officials about democracy and human rights. However, a reinvigoration of the jihadi group following a spectacular jailbreak in 2006 soon led to renewed attention and aid from Washington. Everyone in Sana’a assumed the escape had high-level clearance, part of Saleh’s ongoing policy of making himself necessary to the United States while not directly antagonizing al-Qaeda. “They were supposed to have used forks to dig through sixty-centimeter-thick reinforced concrete,” joked one local to me. “Imagine what they could have done with knives!” Nevertheless, with the unveiling of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a merger of Yemeni and Saudi groups in January 2009, Yemen attained the status of a terrorist hotbed with consequent prominence on the Washington radar screen. Ruled by a kleptocracy, mired in poverty, weak, and unimportant enough to be everybody’s plaything, Yemenis were about to experience the full weight of twenty-first-century U.S. counterterrorism. Adding to their woes was the fact that manhunting rights in their country would be shared by two U.S. targeted-killing agencies, the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command. While JSOC flew its drones out of the leased French base in Djibouti, across the Red Sea, the CIA built a special base in Saudi Arabia, close by the Yemeni border.
As drone strikes by one or the other of these agencies ramped up, from two in 2009 to four in 2010, ten in 2011, to forty-one in 2012, ordinary Yemenis would experience a lesson in drone warfare all too often lost on far-off officials who authorize the killings: though it may appear that drones offer a remote, sanitized mode of warfare, to their victims they are very much a local affair, a fact that was forcefully impressed on Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Marib Province, in May 2010.
Given the closely woven texture of Yemeni family and tribal connections, it should have come as no surprise that al-Shabwani was a cousin of Ayed al-Shabwani, a prominent local al-Qaeda leader. Jaber was also a business partner of a Saleh relative who held a very important position in the security services and with whom he was now in dispute over a matter of $9 million owed him by the Saleh relative. On May 24, Jaber al-Shabwani, accompanied by his uncle, two of his sons, and several bodyguards, went to meet his cousin in hopes of getting him to lay down his arms. A few minutes into the meeting came the distant but unmistakable sound of a drone, whereupon the al-Qaeda Shabwani made a rapid departure. The deputy governor stayed put on the reasonable but mistaken assumption that no one would want to target him. He was wrong. The exploding missile, most likely targeted at his cell phone, killed him, his uncle, and two of his bodyguards, and injured his sons. In Washington, the realization dawned that someone (in this case, the Joint Special Operations Command) had fed the targeters very incorrect information that, according to one report, “may have been intended to result in Mr. Shabwani’s death.” Obama gave his influential adviser, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, a “chest thumping,” by the latter’s account, angrily asking, “How could this happen?” Brennan, meanwhile, was “pissed,” and demanding to know why a deputy governor was meeting with al-Qaeda. If anyone in Washington knew about the $9 million, they kept it to themselves.
This mistargeted killing had more far-reaching consequences than most, since Shabwani’s father, Sheikh Ali al-Shabwani, led members of his tribe in blowing up a section of the vital trans-Yemen oil pipeline in retaliation, leading to millions of dollars in lost revenue for the treasury. Chastened, Washington suspended drone operations in Yemen for a year. Supposedly, when operations resumed, the CIA was playing a greater role and strikes were no longer quite so reliant on Saleh and his cronies for targeting intelligence. But Yemenis may not have noticed the difference, since people were still picked off either in error or as collateral damage. In many cases, security forces could easily have arrested the victims instead of having them summarily incinerated by Hellfire.
Anwar al-Awlaki, for example, billed for a time as “the most dangerous man in the world,” was publicly nominated to the CIA’s kill list in April 2011. Awlaki had already retreated to the heartland of his tribe, the Awalik. It was easy to believe that the fugitive was hidden in the desert fastness, but in fact, as Guardian reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad discovered when he visited the tribe’s ruling Sultan, although everyone in the neighborhood knew where the notorious preacher was living, no one seemed interested in arresting him. “The government haven’t asked us to hand him in,” Sultan Fareed bin Babaker told the reporter. “If they do then we will think about it. But no one has asked us.”
A few weeks before this conversation took place, a pair of Justice Department lawyers in Washington had obligingly provided the Obama administration with a secret legal justification for summarily executing Awlaki, accepting as a premise that he posed an “imminent” threat and that his capture was “infeasible.” The July 16, 2010, memorandum, which the New York Times later described as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories … clearly tailored to the desired result,” invoked, among other precedents, a 2006 Israeli court decision on targeted killing. The Israeli Supreme Court did indeed rule in December 2006 that “targeted preventions” would be legal in certain cases, when absolutely necessary to prevent a “ticking bomb” scenario but not otherwise. However, as revealed by Anat Kamm, an Israeli whistle-blower who copied documents while serving in the IDF, the Israeli military routinely disregarded the judgment when making targeting decisions. Kamm was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for her action.
Awlaki was finally killed by a CIA drone in September 2011 and his son, Abdul Rahman, by a JSOC drone two weeks later. The boy died because he and seven others happened to be having dinner at a restaurant where a high-value al-Qaeda target, Ibrahim al-Banna, was thought to be eating, it evidently being the targeters’ assumption that any fellow diners were guilty by culinary association.
Anwar al-Awlaki had been a prime target thanks to his connection to two failed attempts to explode bombs on American planes, not to mention his mentoring of Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist accused of killing thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009. But although the direct threat to “the homeland” apparently receded with his elimination, the pace of U.S. attacks on Yemeni targets only increased. In 2011, President Saleh, faced with massive protests against his misrule, withdrew his forces from the southern province of Abyan, a center of southern separatism in which al-Qaeda had gained a strong foothold. To those who knew him, this was a typical Saleh ploy. As Abdul Ghani al-Iryani, a well-known political analyst in Sana’a, stated flatly at the time: “The regime decided to hand over this territory to [al-Qaeda] to underline the risk of terrorism in the eyes of the west. That didn’t really work, except that it created a very dangerous situation for the population. So, the regime hands over the land, the territory, to the extremists and then starts bombing them with all kinds of weapons.” The hapless inhabitants of this miserably poor enclave found themselves lumped in with al-Qaeda under a rain of bombs and Hellfire missiles unleashed by the United States but for which the Yemeni government, corrupt, repressive, hated, was happy to take responsibility.
Saleh’s Abyan ploy did not save his presidency, although he did get to keep all that neatly stacked cash in the basement. His replacement, Abd Rubbah Mansour Hadi, continued many of the same policies, including, at least for a while, wholehearted endorsement of the drone strikes. Many of those being hunted were no doubt al-Qaeda officials in good standing, even if their international impact was limited, but the targeting of people who could easily have been arrested persisted. Al-Qaeda member Hamid al-Radmi, for example, was incinerated in his car in central Yemen in April 2013 by three missiles even though he was in frequent contact with security and political officials as a mediator. Adnan al-Qadhi, a colonel in an elite army unit who was clearly sympathetic to al-Qaeda, was killed although he lived and moved openly in a village on the edge of Sana’a that was home to many of the country’s ruling elite. “They could have picked him up any time, but he was a relative of Ali Mohsen [a very important commander]. It would have been too embarrassing to arrest a relative,” one Sanani explained to me, “so Ali Mohsen said ‘let the Americans kill him.’”
Inevitably, collateral victims accumulated; the driver and his cousin whose taxi passengers were two targeted al-Qaeda members or the twelve passengers in a minibus, including three children and a pregnant woman, on their way home from market in the central highland town of Rada’a in September 2012, burned so badly their bodies were unrecognizable, or the anti–al-Qaeda preacher, Salim bin Ali Jaber, killed in August 2012 along with his cousin, village policeman Walid bin Ali Jaber, while arguing with three targeted suspects. “If Salim and Walid are al-Qaeda,” chanted infuriated villagers as they marched through the village four days after the strike, “then we are all al-Qaeda.”
The villagers also chanted, “Obama, this is wrong,” a point with which the president should have agreed, at least after May 23, 2013, when the White House issued “U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.” This document stated clearly and unequivocally: “[L]ethal force will be used only to prevent or stop attacks on U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible.” Moreover, “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” and only when there was a “near certainty that non-combatants will not be killed or injured.”
It all depended on what was meant by “imminent.” Over fifteen days in the summer of 2013 the United States hit Yemen with nine strikes, killing as many as forty-nine people, including up to seven civilians, three of whom were children. Officials told the New York Times that intelligence of a possible terrorist threat (in the form of an intercepted dispatch from al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri instructing his lieutenant in Yemen, Nasir al Wuhayshi, to “do something”) had “expanded the scope of people we could go after” and that none of those killed in the stepped-up strikes were “household names.” Rather, they were “rising stars” who could become future leaders. An unnamed official was quoted as explaining: “Before, we couldn’t necessarily go after a driver for the organization; it’d have to be an operations director. Now that driver becomes fair game because he’s providing direct support to the plot.”
Clearly, things had come a very long way since George Bush had begun crossing out names in the list he kept in his desk drawer. A well-funded bureaucratic mechanism to service the “disposition matrix,” as the kill list had been euphemistically relabeled, was centered at the National Counterterrorism Center, whose 500-strong staff was charged with, among other things, collating the various lists crafted by the CIA and JSOC and others. (As noted, the president liked to have the very last word. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” he remarked the day Awlaki died. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”) John Brennan, who moved from the White House to take formal command of the CIA in 2013, was credited with having overseen the crafting of this elaborate and complex system, a monument to the principle of “precise precision” while nominating people far away for execution. In reality, this arrangement illustrated how faithfully twenty-first-century assassination practices followed the hoary traditions of strategic bombing, in which “targeting committees” had long labored to discern “critical nodes,” remorselessly expanding target lists in the process.
In April 2014, Western media took notice of an al-Qaeda rally—a party to welcome twenty-nine fellow jihadis who had broken out of jail in Sana’a in February—that had taken place somewhere in Yemen the month before. As shown in an al-Qaeda video, many hundreds of armed, chanting, cheerful-looking fighters paraded through a canyon and stood in long lines to greet a smiling Nasir al-Wuhayshi. No one appeared concerned that they might be under surveillance by the “unblinking eye.” Coincidentally or not, this striking demonstration of jihadi insouciance was immediately followed, once the video reached a wider audience, by multiple drone strikes in several southern provinces. As many as sixty-five people, including at least three children, died over three days.
Despite the intensity of the attacks, no one in authority was able to name a single one of the victims, nor were there any official leaks or even hints that the attacks were aimed at foiling any threat, imminent or otherwise, to “U.S. persons.” The White House off-loaded the chore of commenting on the strikes to the Yemeni government, which duly followed orders in claiming responsibility. Reports from Sana’a indicated that the Yemeni regime had been hoping to persuade the United States to limit the strikes that provided al-Qaeda with such an effective recruiting tool, but such pleas from a feeble client regime could easily be brushed aside.
In any event, there were fresh opportunities beckoning for drone warfare, not just traditional operations in benighted regions of the third world, such as North Africa, but against more formidable enemies. This in turn offered new challenges and the alluring prospect of enhanced budgets.