ON THE MORNING OF Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Illinois state senator Barack Obama was driving to a legislative hearing in downtown Chicago when he heard on the radio that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time he arrived at the meeting, a second plane had flown into the Twin Towers. “We were told to evacuate,” Obama recalls. Out on the streets, people looked nervously up at the sky, fearing that the Sears Tower, Chicago’s landmark skyscraper, was also a possible target. Back at his office, Obama watched the images from New York: “a plane vanishing into glass and steel; men and women clinging to windowsills, then letting go; tall towers crumbling to dust.”
Six years later, Obama was a U.S. senator mounting what seemed a quixotic challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. Clinton appeared to hold all the cards: name recognition, the Clinton money machine, the endorsement of many of the Democratic Party’s heavy hitters, top political consultants working on her team, and the hopes of many that she would be the first female president of the United States. But Obama thought she was vulnerable, particularly because of her support for the Iraq War, which was by now deeply unpopular, and which he had come out firmly against five years earlier. And Obama impressed a growing number of supporters with his intellect, his cool, and his ability to inspire young people, who flocked to his campaign. An Obama win, some hoped, would also help to heal the American Original Sin of slavery and subsequent racial discrimination.
As Obama’s long-shot campaign gathered steam, on July 17, 2007, an unclassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the state of al-Qaeda was released to the media with a considerable splash. The estimate concluded that al-Qaeda “has protected or regenerated key elements of its homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.” This wasn’t exactly news. In the summer of 2005, al-Qaeda had directed the deadliest terrorist attack in British history, killing fifty-two commuters on the London transportation system. And the following summer, there had been a foiled attempt to blow up as many as seven American, Canadian, and British airliners with liquid explosives smuggled onto planes at London’s Heathrow airport. The public release of the key findings of the NIE was an official recognition that al-Qaeda had regrouped and was capable again of pulling off significant attacks in the West, and that the Bush administration’s policy of giving the Pakistani military dictator Pervez Musharraf a free pass to deal on his own terms with the militant groups based in Pakistan’s tribal regions was now over.
A couple of weeks after this NIE was released, Obama was scheduled to give a keynote speech on national security at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He met with his foreign policy advisors, Susan Rice and Denis McDonough, and speechwriter Ben Rhodes, at the modest two-room offices on Massachusetts Avenue that served as the Obama campaign headquarters in Washington. Together they hashed out a speech that encapsulated the Obama campaign’s foreign policy critiques of the Bush administration: that it had diverted too many resources to Iraq and had taken its eyes off al-Qaeda, and that it didn’t have a strategy for taking out al-Qaeda’s leaders in their bases in Pakistan’s tribal regions. Obama and his advisors kicked around exactly what language he would use in the speech. The decision was made to take a harsh line on Musharraf, whom they believed the Bush administration had coddled for too long.
There was a lot riding on the speech at the Wilson Center. The fact was, most of the D.C.-based punditocracy thought Senator Obama was a bit green, especially on national security issues and, in particular, by comparison to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, who had already served two decades in the Senate and was a leading member of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Clinton, too, was regarded as someone with credibility on national security issues. She also served on the Armed Services Committee and had traveled to dozens of nations when her husband was president, which had put her on a first-name basis with many world leaders.
The Wilson Center speech did not seem to allay doubts about Obama’s experience. Much of the attention that it garnered from the media and other presidential candidates focused on a section about al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan, in which Obama declared, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.… I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”
At a debate for Democratic presidential candidates in Chicago a week after the Wilson Center speech, Obama came under attack from Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who said Obama’s suggestion of a possible American unilateral strike into Pakistan was “irresponsible.” Senator Clinton piled on: “I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that.” To large applause, Obama struck back at Dodd and Clinton, who had both voted to authorize the Iraq War, saying, “I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.”
Obama’s supposed weakness on national security was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s most famous campaign ad, which debuted in late February 2008. Over pictures of children sleeping at night and the sound of a ringing phone, a man’s voice intoned portentously, “It’s three a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call. Whether it’s someone who already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It’s three a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?” At the end of the ad the pictures of sleeping children dissolved to a shot of a composed Hillary Clinton wearing glasses and answering the phone. Obama was never mentioned, but he was clearly the person whom the Clinton campaign was targeting.
Criticism of Obama’s presumed bellicosity toward Pakistan was not limited to the Democrats. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney ridiculed Obama as a “Dr. Strangelove” who is “going to bomb our allies.” John McCain also weighed in: “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?” When accepting his party’s nomination for president in Denver in late August 2008, Obama took a swipe back at McCain, saying, “John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives.”
After Obama was inaugurated as president he faced a choice. Many of the voters who had elected him had done so because he was the “antiwar candidate” who had spoken out early against the Iraq War. Once in office, Obama could have recast Bush’s “Global War on Terror” as a large-scale law enforcement campaign against jihadist terrorists, which many on the left of the Democratic Party believed was a more useful and accurate formulation. Obama did not choose that path. Instead, he publicly declared that the United States was at “war against al-Qaeda and its allies.” This framing had a number of advantages: it opened a way for groups such as the Taliban, which might one day choose to distance itself from al-Qaeda, to enjoy peaceful relations with the United States, and it named the enemy rather than continuing the Bush formulation of a vague and open-ended conflict against a tactic that had existed for millennia. For Obama, however, the conflict remained a war, and not some kind of global police action.
Perhaps his views on national security had to do with when he came of age. Obama was the first major American politician in decades whose views about national security weren’t deeply informed by what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam. Too young to have served in Vietnam as the senators John McCain and John Kerry did, he was also too young to have avoided service in Vietnam as Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush had. For Obama, Vietnam was a nonissue, and it is possible this fact contributed to his greater willingness to use military power in comparison to an older generation of Democrats. It took Clinton two years to intervene in Bosnia, which was on the verge of genocide, whereas it took Obama only a week or so to intervene in Libya in the spring of 2011, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi was threatening large-scale massacres of his own population.
Obama embraced American “hard power” from the moment he assumed office. Only three days after his inauguration, at his first National Security Council meeting on January 23, 2009, the head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Michael J. Sulick, proposed that the United States continue the aggressive campaign of drone strikes in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Obama approved the campaign. That same day, a pair of CIA drone strikes in North Waziristan and South Waziristan reportedly killed ten militants and some dozen bystanders.
On December 9, 2009, Obama went to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy.” Seemingly confounding the expectations of those who awarded him the prize, a little over a week earlier, troubled by the recent resurgence of the Taliban, he had substantially ramped up the Afghan War, authorizing a “surge” of thirty thousand troops, thereby doubling the number of American soldiers in Afghanistan. During his brief time in office, his administration had also authorized an unprecedented forty-five drone strikes aimed at Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda networks, killing about a half-dozen leaders of militant organizations—including two heads of Uzbek terrorist groups allied with al-Qaeda, and Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban—in addition to hundreds of lower-level militants and a smaller number of civilians (about 5 percent of the total), according to reliable press reports.
This policy of the targeted killing and execution without trial of hundreds of people was greeted mostly with silence by the human rights groups and those on the Left who had loudly condemned the Bush administration for its use of coercive interrogations and the lack of due process at Guantánamo.
Obama used the occasion of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Oslo to mount a nuanced defense of just wars, in particular the ground war and drone campaign he was waging against al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The president acknowledged the great legacies of nonviolent approaches to social change bequeathed to the world by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., but he also made it perfectly clear that his opposition to the Iraq War didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism—not at all. Obama declared, “I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”
Obama understood that simply because the Bush administration had tended to inflate the threat from al-Qaeda into an existential one similar to that posed by the Nazis or the Soviets, it didn’t mean, conversely, that the threat was merely a mirage. In the year before his Nobel acceptance speech, Obama had been reminded about the reality of the threat from terrorists in many ways. Before he was even sworn in, he received some of his first intelligence briefings about the brutal three-day attack in Mumbai, India, in late November 2008, in which ten gunmen had targeted five-star hotels, a railway station, and an American-Jewish community center, killing some 170 people.
On the freezing day of January 20, 2009, when Obama took office as president, the intelligence community was at a high level of alert because of a serious threat to his inauguration by Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-allied militant group based in Somalia. A group of Al-Shabaab terrorists was reported to be arriving in the United States from Canada to detonate a bomb on the Mall in Washington, D.C., where a million people would be gathered to watch Obama take the oath of office. The top counterterrorism aide to George W. Bush, Juan Zarate, says that during the four days before the inauguration, chasing down this threat consumed the attention of top national security officials on both the Bush and Obama teams: “Most of these threats, they wash out fairly early on, because elements of the story don’t pan out. I got a call from my deputy, Nick Rasmussen, saying, ‘This isn’t washing out.’ ” In the end, the inauguration passed peacefully, and the threat from Al-Shabaab was determined to be a “poison pen,” in which one group of Somali militants sought to make mischief for a rival group. But it was a stark reminder to Obama and his national security team that terrorism would be a major focus of their young administration.
Obama was determined, as he put it, to “destroy, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda.” And what better way to speed that process than to eliminate bin Laden? Shortly after Obama assumed office, he met with CIA director Leon Panetta privately in the Oval Office and asked him, “How’s the trail? Has it gone completely cold?” Panetta told the president that there weren’t many promising leads. Obama said to him, “We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down.” In other meetings, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, and other senior members of the administration asked CIA officials point-blank, “Where do you think Osama bin Laden is?” The officials replied that they didn’t have a clue, except that he was somewhere in Pakistan.
In late May 2009, Obama received one of his regularly scheduled briefings from his counterterrorism team in the Situation Room, which included an update on the hunt for bin Laden and his deputy Zawahiri. After the meeting, the president asked Panetta and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon to join him privately in the Oval Office. The president asked them both to sit down and said, “We really need to intensify this effort. Leon, it needs to be your number one goal.” On June 2, Obama signed a memo to Panetta that stated, “In order to ensure that we have expended every effort, I direct you to provide me within 30 days a detailed operation plan for locating and bringing to justice” bin Laden.
Five senior U.S. intelligence officials who worked for both Bush and Obama say that the idea that the CIA needed to be pushed to do more on bin Laden is laughable; the Agency was doing as much as it could already. Still, Panetta made updates on the hunt for bin Laden a required element of the three-day-a-week operational updates on counterterrorism and Middle East issues he already received. Woven into that was a weekly update on the hunt for bin Laden. Even if they had nothing, Panetta made it clear to his staff that they should tell him what they knew. It became embarrassing to bring nothing new to these briefings.
One promising lead appeared to be Saad bin Laden, one of the al-Qaeda leader’s older sons, who had spent most of the past decade living under some form of house arrest in Iran. Saad was in his late twenties and had already played a minor leadership role in al-Qaeda. Around the time that Obama assumed office, Saad had been quietly released by the Iranians and had made his way to Pakistan’s tribal regions. CIA officials tracking Saad hoped that he might try to find his father and so lead them to him. But itchy trigger fingers at the CIA prevailed, and in late July 2009 Saad was killed in an Agency drone strike, which took that lead firmly off the table.
Around the same time, what appeared to be the first real break to penetrate the top leadership of al-Qaeda was brought to Panetta: a Jordanian agent who was willing to spy on the inner circles of the terrorist group in Pakistan. This was of great interest because, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars consumed by American intelligence agencies since 9/11, the United States had never managed to place a spy inside al-Qaeda. Humam al-Balawi was a Jordanian pediatrician in his early thirties who had become radicalized by the Iraq War and had subsequently become an important voice on militant jihadist websites. Balawi was arrested in early 2009 by Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID), with which the CIA enjoyed exceptionally close relations. After offering the doctor the possibility of earning substantial sums of money, GID officials believed they had “turned” Balawi, who said he was willing to go to the tribal regions of Pakistan to spy on the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The doctor quickly came through. In the early fall of 2009, Balawi sent his handlers at Jordanian intelligence a short video clip of himself sitting with Atiyah Abdul Rahman, one of bin Laden’s top aides. Suddenly CIA officials saw the Jordanian doctor as a “golden source.” Balawi told his handlers that his skills as a physician meant that he was being introduced to the leaders of al-Qaeda, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, to whom he was providing medical treatment. The CIA became so hopeful that in November 2009, Panetta told the president that the Jordanian doctor might soon lead the Agency to Zawahiri himself.
A jolting reminder of the importance of dismantling al-Qaeda’s leadership structure in Pakistan had come just two months earlier. In early September 2009, Najibullah Zazi traveled from Denver to New York “to conduct martyrdom operations” in the Manhattan subway system. Zazi, an Afghan American who had been trained by al-Qaeda in Pakistan, planned to launch what would have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11, by detonating bombs made with seemingly innocuous hair bleach, a signature of recent al-Qaeda plots. Under heavy FBI surveillance, Zazi was spotted in downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2009, the eighth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. From the time of Zazi’s arrival in New York, Obama had received multiple briefings about the case from his national security team. Eight days later, Zazi was arrested. He was the first genuine al-Qaeda recruit to be discovered living in the United States in six years. On his laptop the FBI discovered pages of handwritten notes about the manufacture of explosives, technical know-how he had picked up at one of al-Qaeda’s training facilities in Pakistan’s tribal regions in 2008.
On Christmas Day 2009, the Obama administration faced an even larger threat when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a twenty-three-year-old from a prominent Nigerian family, boarded Northwest Airlines flight 253 in Amsterdam, which was bound for Detroit with some three hundred passengers and crew. Hidden in his underwear was a bomb made with a plastic explosive that went undetected at airport security. As the plane neared Detroit, the young man tried to ignite the bomb. Some combination of his own ineptitude, faulty bomb construction, and the quick actions of the passengers and crew, who subdued him, prevented an explosion that might have brought down the plane. Immediately after he was arrested, Abdulmutallab told investigators that the explosive device “was acquired in Yemen along with instructions as to when it should be used.”
If Abdulmutallab had succeeded in bringing down Northwest Airlines flight 253, the bombing would not only have killed hundreds but also seriously damaged the U.S. economy, already reeling from the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression. It would also have dealt a crippling blow to Obama’s presidency. According to the White House’s own review of the Christmas Day plot, there was sufficient information already known to the U.S. government to determine that Abdulmutallab was likely working for al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. As Obama admitted in a meeting of his national security team after the Nigerian was in custody, “We dodged a bullet.”
The Christmas Day plot made the stakes all the higher for the CIA officials who knew of the Jordanian doctor and his promises to execute the first high-level penetration of al-Qaeda since 9/11. However, no one at the CIA had met Balawi, and pressure was mounting to get some Agency eyes on him. That task fell to Jennifer Matthews, the CIA station chief in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, who had worked for the bin Laden unit almost from its inception. Matthews arranged for the Jordanian doctor to slip over the border from Pakistan’s tribal areas to meet with her and a considerable team from the CIA. Determined that this first meeting with the golden source be warm and friendly, Matthews did not have Balawi searched when he entered the CIA section of Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost on December 30, 2009. She had even arranged for a cake to be made for Balawi, whose birthday had been only five days earlier.
But there was to be no opportunity to celebrate. As he met with the CIA team, the Jordanian doctor began muttering to himself in Arabic, reached inside his coat, and then detonated a bomb that killed Matthews, a forty-five-year-old mother of three, and six other CIA officers and contractors who had gathered to meet him. It was the deadliest single day at the Agency since Hezbollah blew up the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983, killing eight CIA employees. The doctor from Jordan had not been spying on al-Qaeda’s leaders; he had, in fact, been recruited by them.
John Brennan, who had served at the CIA for decades and was now Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor, says the suicide bombing at Khost only deepened the Agency’s determination to find the men they termed Number One and Number Two, making it “very personal for a lot of CIA officers.” So personal that in the three weeks after Balawi’s suicide attack, the CIA launched an unprecedented eleven drone strikes aimed at al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan’s tribal regions, killing more than sixty militants.
Within the space of a week, al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch had almost downed an American commercial jet flying over the United States, and its Pakistan-based core had succeeded in killing seven CIA employees. It was a stark reminder that the Agency had to eliminate the leader of al-Qaeda.
Under Panetta, the CIA began pushing harder to put more Agency officers on the ground in Pakistan. The war in Iraq was winding down, which freed up more assets for the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater, including spies, drones, and satellites. The November 2008 Mumbai attacks, which were carried out by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group, demonstrated that al-Qaeda was not the only terrorist organization based in Pakistan that was intent on attacking American targets. The State Department’s Vali Nasr, a top advisor on Pakistan, explains, “The CIA goes into a completely different mode, almost like Pakistan becomes your Berlin of the 1960s, where you need to have assets, eyes, ears. Not for a specific project, but broadly, because every threat coming at us is probably going to come from here. You have to have your own assets. You have to have your own operations.” Shamila Chaudhary, the director for Pakistan at the National Security Council, recalls that in the spring of 2010 there was a backlog of almost four hundred U.S. officials who were requesting visas for Pakistan. Clearly, these were not all conventional diplomats.
At the same time, in their public statements and in private meetings with U.S. officials, leading Pakistani politicians maintained with great conviction that bin Laden wasn’t in their country. During an interview on CNN in April 2010, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said, “Certainly he is not in Pakistan.” Six months earlier Interior Minister Rehman Malik had met with a delegation of members of Congress and assured them that bin Laden wasn’t in the area, although he could be in Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen, or even dead.
Despite these denials, the necessity for the CIA to have more of its own assets in Pakistan was dramatically confirmed on May 1, 2010, when Faisal Shahzad, an American of Pakistani descent trained by the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, tried unsuccessfully to blow up his SUV in New York City’s Times Square on a busy Saturday night. In late May, Panetta traveled to Pakistan to deliver a stern message to Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders, making an open-ended threat that “all bets are off” should Pakistan-based terrorists successfully carry out an attack in the United States. Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari pushed back, saying of Shahzad, “This guy is an American citizen. Why don’t you have things more under control on your end?”
Not only did Obama sign off on a large increase in the number of CIA assets on the ground in Pakistan and an intensified campaign of CIA drone warfare there, but he also would come to embrace the use of covert military units in countries where the United States wasn’t fighting traditional land wars, such as Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. By 2011, to the dismay of at least some of those who had voted for the “antiwar” president, the United States was waging some kind of war in six Muslim countries simultaneously.