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.
8 ANATOMY OF A LEAD
IT WAS NOT UNTIL 2010 that the CIA had a series of significant breakthroughs regarding the Kuwaiti, the elusive courier. Earlier, with the help of a “third country” that officials won’t identify, the Agency had been able to tie him to his real name, Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed. Still, his whereabouts remained unknown.
Then, in June 2010, the Kuwaiti and his brother both made changes in the way they communicated on cell phones that suddenly opened up the possibility of the “geolocation” of their phones. Knowing this, the Agency painstakingly reviewed reams of “captured” phone conversations of the Kuwaiti’s family and circle of associates. Around this time the CIA conducted a joint operation with Pakistan’s military intelligence service on phone numbers associated with an al-Qaeda “facilitation network.” The Pakistanis did not know that some of these numbers were linked to Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, but they could tell that one of the suspects in the network was speaking in a mix of both Arabic and Pashto, the language of northwest Pakistan, which was unusual. This suspect’s phones were also switched off most of the time and were turned back on only in and around the city of Peshawar in northern Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border.
Finally, in the summer, the Kuwaiti received a call from an old friend in the Persian Gulf, a man being monitored by U.S. intelligence.
“We’ve missed you. Where have you been?” asked the friend.
“I’m back with the people I was with before,” the Kuwaiti responded elliptically.
There was a tense pause in the conversation as the friend mulled this over. “May God facilitate,” the caller finally said, likely realizing that the Kuwaiti was back in bin Laden’s inner circle.
CIA officials took this call as confirmation that the Kuwaiti was still likely working with al-Qaeda, something they h
ad not been entirely sure about. The National Security Agency was listening to this exchange and, through geolocation technologies, was able to zero in on the Kuwaiti’s cell phone in northwestern Pakistan. But to find out where the Kuwaiti lived by monitoring his cell phone would go only so far. The courier practiced rigorous operational security and was always careful to insert the battery in his phone and to turn it on only when he was at least an hour’s drive away from the Abbottabad compound where he and bin Laden were living. And Pakistan was a country of 180 million people.
In August 2010 a Pakistani “asset” working for the CIA tracked the Kuwaiti to Peshawar, where bin Laden had founded al-Qaeda more than two decades earlier. In the years that bin Laden had been residing in the Abbottabad compound, the Kuwaiti regularly passed through Peshawar, the gateway to the Pakistani tribal regions where al-Qaeda had regrouped after 9/11. Once the CIA asset had identified the Kuwaiti’s distinctive white Suzuki Jeep with a spare tire on its back in Peshawar, he was able to follow him as he drove home to Abbottabad, more than two hours’ drive to the east. The large compound where the Kuwaiti finally alighted immediately drew interest at the Agency because it didn’t have phone or Internet service, suggesting that its owners wanted to stay off the grid.
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