Instead, Saleh brokered a scheme wherein most of the suspects would be prosecuted and sentenced in Yemen. In 2002, under pressure from Washington to do something, Saleh had created what he called a “dialogue council” to “confront” the jihadists on his soil through rehabilitation and reconciliation. “The Yemeni state felt an urgent need to act against radical Islamism,” observed terrorism researcher Ane Skov Birk. “This need arose from a perceived danger to the state partly from the militants themselves, and partly from the possibility of an American led war on Yemen if the state failed to act against these militants.” Hundreds of Yemenis were taken into custody as part of the program, and there were reports of torture and cruel treatment that amounted to “gross violations of the detainees’ rights.” Between 2002 and 2005, more than three hundred Yemenis were released. Several of the program’s “graduates” would go on to return to the struggle, fighting in Iraq or joining al Qaeda or other militant groups in Yemen, and the program was eventually discontinued in 2005. For seasoned observers of Yemen, Saleh’s game over the Cole suspects was akin to a hostage scheme aimed at wresting more money, training and military hardware from the United States. Handing them over to the United States would be a political disaster internally for Saleh and would take away his negotiating power with Washington.
“After the Cole, Saleh knew al Qaeda couldn’t be trusted, but he wouldn’t drop that card,” said the former top US counterterrorism official who worked extensively in Yemen during this period. He told me that once al Qaeda suspects ended up in jail, Saleh would eventually “release them through a fictional ‘rehabilitation’ program where they would swear on the Koran to renounce terrorism or through pardons or by simply allowing them to escape.” In 2003, ten of the leading Cole suspects escaped from prison, beginning a multiyear pattern of arrests, convictions, escapes and rearrests. “Al-Qaeda intends to cause just enough sporadic damage to persuade [Saleh’s] regime that it is best to curtail its efforts to destroy al-Qaeda and to allow the group to operate relatively freely in and from Yemen as long as no major attacks are staged in the country,” observed former senior CIA official Michael Scheuer. Saleh’s approach to alleged al Qaeda operatives, Scheuer asserted, “almost certainly equates to a license for the militants to do what they want, where they want, as long as it is not in Yemen.”
From 2003 to 2006, while Saleh’s government remained largely off the Bush administration’s radar, there was an occasional meeting to demand action on the Cole suspects. In 2004, James Pavitt, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, told the 9/11 Commission, “Our operations, in concert with our partners, are gaining ground against the core of al Qaeda,” adding: “Two and a half years ago we would have listed our top concerns: Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Southeast Asia,” but today, “almost every senior target is gone in Yemen, killed or captured.” In reality, a sleeping giant was just waking up.
“Never Trust a Nonbeliever”
THE UNITED KINGDOM, 2003 —As the Iraq invasion was quickly transforming into an occupation, Anwar Awlaki returned to Yemen, but there, his father persuaded him to give Britain another shot. Anwar left his family in his parents’ care and returned to the United Kingdom, where he would remain for almost two more years, often preaching at well-known mosques. Among Awlaki’s sponsors were the Muslim Association of Britain and the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, both of which had strong ties to the global Muslim Brotherhood organization. His partnership with these organizations is likely to have been one of expediency, noted researcher Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, who conducted an extensive historical study of Awlaki’s life, “whereby they sought to co-opt a charismatic young preacher in order to help them gain influence among Western Muslims, and in return, they opened up to him the benefits of their considerable organizational capacities, providing Awlaki with ready-made large audiences and venues.” Awlaki went on a speaking tour across Britain in 2003, lecturing at prominent universities and colleges and community organizations on the “war against Islam” and the role of Muslims in the Western world. “His popularity in the West was now at its peak, and he drew in large crowds,” according to Meleagrou-Hitchens. Dr. Usama Hasan, the former imam of the Tawheed Mosque in Leyton, North London, said that Awlaki had become “one of the icons of Western Salafism and would pack out every venue he spoke at. People were excited to see him.”
Awlaki continued to spread his message and, though many of his speeches focused on religious teachings or making modern analogies to Muhammad and other prophets, his politics were clearly growing more militant. His sermons resonated with young people who were coming of age in an era where they perceived their religion as being demonized. “There is a global culture that is being forced down the throats of everyone on the face of the earth. This global culture is protected and promoted. Thomas Friedman, he is a famous writer in the US, he writes for the New York Times. He says the hidden hand of the market cannot survive without the hidden fist. McDonald’s will never flourish without McDonnell Douglas—the designer of F-15s,” Awlaki said in one sermon. “In other words, we are not really dealing with a global culture that is benign or compassionate. This is a culture that gives you no choice. Either accept McDonald’s, otherwise McDonnell Douglas will send their F-15s above your head. It is very intolerant culture that cannot coexist with anything else. It uproots every other culture on the face of the earth. Just cuts the roots of it. And you have a quote here by [Russian historian and Soviet dissident] Alexander Solzhenitsyn...‘To destroy a people, you must sever their roots.’ And the only ideology that is standing up to this global culture is Islam.” Awlaki decried the reality he perceived among young Western Muslims, that they
have more in common with the rock star or a soccer player than they would have with the companions of Rasool Allah [the prophet Muhammad]. You would find that our youth know more about pop stars than they know about the Sahaba [companions] of Rasool. In fact even sometimes more than the Anbiya [Prophets]. How many of our youth know the names of all of the Anbiya of Allah? How many of our youth know the names of the Sahaba? But ask the same person to name the soccer players on their favorite team or their best basketball players and they would go down the list. So there is a serious identity crisis that is going on among Muslims.
Awlaki would weave in pop cultural references with stories from the Koran. He railed against the corporate media and international human rights organizations, which he denounced as propagandists for those who were “plotting to kill” Islam. In London, Awlaki delivered a speech in which he warned young Muslims not to be taken in by the perceived kindness of their non-Muslim neighbors or friends. “The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar [a nonbeliever]. Do not trust him. Now, you might argue and say, ‘But my neighbor is such a nice person, my classmates are very nice. My coworkers, they are just fabulous people, they’re so decent and honest. And, you know, the only problem is that we Muslims are giving Islam a bad name. If these terrorists would just stop what they’re doing,’” Awlaki said. “Now, I’m not going to argue that your neighbor is not a nice person. Or your classmate. They truly might be decent and nice people. But, brothers,” he added, “this person that you know is not the one calling the shots. And when the Quran talks about” the nonbelievers, “it talks about the leaders,” those who “are pulling the strings. Don’t make a judgment” based “on Jane Doe and John Doe. You don’t make it based on Joe Six-Pack or Sally Soccer Mom.” The nonbelievers, he said, were intent on destroying Islam. “We need to wisen up and not be duped,” he told the rapt audience. “Malcolm X used to say, ‘We’ve been bamboozled.’”
Awlaki spoke frequently of the harassment and detention of Muslims across the globe, from Guantánamo to London to Virginia and beyond. He implored his followers to see their struggles in the West as the same as those in Muslim countries. “We are watching one Muslim nation fall after another, and we are watching, sitting back, doing nothing. When Palestine was taken, we did nothing,” he boomed at a serm
on in London as part of an event called “Stop Police Terror.” “The Ummah [the global Muslim community] is watching while Iraq is being devoured. It’s not going to end there, because it will spill over to other countries like Syria and only Allah knows who is next.” He added, “When we allow a Muslim nation to fall down, we have allowed the same thing to happen to every and each one of us.”
The December 2003 lecture was organized as part of a series of events in Britain opposing what the Muslim community saw as a racist crackdown. Using antiterror laws similar to the PATRIOT Act in the United States, British security forces began a campaign of mass arrests of Muslims—many of them students—on suspicion of involvement with terror plots. “We are arresting people continuously,” Britain’s top police official, John Stevens, declared. “It is part of this massive effort we have been having since 11th September. And it will continue.” It was against this backdrop that Awlaki told his audience, “Many Muslims have been arrested. You know when you talk about Guantánamo Bay and all that stuff; there is a Guantánamo Bay in this country. There were 524 Muslims who were arrested under the new laws and only 2 of them have been charged. You have over 520 Muslims who are locked up in jail, and are left to rot in there, and there’s no crime—they have not committed anything and there are no charges brought against them. They are left there for months at end, to just rot in those prison cells. What have you done for them?” He called his followers to action. “We just sit there watching and doing nothing. Thinking by ducking down and by being quiet, we will be safe. If you don’t stop it now, it’s gonna happen to you, it might happen to your wife, it might happen to your own daughter. You need to stop it in its tracks before it grows.... So you need to do whatever you are capable of doing. This is a responsibility—it’s hanging on your neck. It is something that you owe to your Muslim brothers, you owe it to the Ummah and you owe it to Allah.”
In London, Awlaki’s sermons became more political, condemning the wars in Muslim countries and the detention of Muslims in the West. Guantánamo and the US torture program clearly had a major impact on him. “He became a social figure, you see,” recalled his father. Although many of his earlier sermons were apolitical and focused on the lives of the prophets and Koranic interpretation, Anwar had become a political activist. “Anwar, in all his lectures, tried to connect them with something modern that was happening,” Nasser said.
In his sermons, Awlaki would weave his theories about the United States being at war with Islam with condemnations of torture, at times taking his theories into the realm of conspiracy, particularly in his denunciations of human rights organizations. “The Jews and the Christians will not be pleased until you become like them. How can we have trust in the leaders of kufr [disbelief] when today, today, right now, right now, there are Muslim brothers in jail?” Awlaki declared in a lecture in Britain, his voice shaking with passion. “Every sinister method of interrogation is used against them. They would use against them homosexuals to rape them. They would bring their mothers and sisters and wives and they would rape them in front of these brothers. Now it’s true that this is not happening in the West, but the West knows about it. The United Nations knows about it. Amnesty International knows about it and they’re doing nothing. In fact, sometimes they are encouraging it.”
Meleagrou-Hitchens has pointed out that in all of his time in Britain, Awlaki did not “make clear and public statements in support of violent jihad in a contemporary Western context,” adding that “although Awlaki sought to spark an Islamist political awakening within his audience, he was not openly calling for violent jihad against Western countries.” While Awlaki lectured on jihad and used historical Arab texts, such as Book of Jihad, authored by Ibn Nuhaas, a fourteenth-century scholar who died fighting against the Moguls and the Crusaders, he was careful in offering his rationale. “I want to state in the beginning and make it very clear that our study of this book is not an exhortation or an invitation to violence or a promotion of violence against an individual or society or a state,” Awlaki said in one lecture on the book. “We are studying a book that is 600 years old...so that is the extent of what we are doing. It’s a purely academic study of an old traditional book.” It was clear that Awlaki was thinking of his next move, and Meleagrou-Hitchens believed that his “disclaimer” about not calling for violence “was likely made with the intention of avoiding the attention of British security authorities.”
Awlaki’s stock among young, English-speaking Muslims on the street was rising by the day, but his solitary life in Britain, away from his wife and children, was not sustainable.
Ultimately, Awlaki decided to return to Sana’a. Nasser Awlaki said it was because Anwar had been unable to afford to live in the West and wanted to pursue business and educational opportunities in Yemen. But some of Anwar’s associates in the United Kingdom had a different view. Usama Hasan, who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, suggested that Awlaki wanted to put his money where his mouth was. “I’ve got a feeling that he’s always been yearning for it [to fight jihad], and our yearning was satiated in a way, but he never got that outlet,” he said. “Add to that his strong links to Yemen, which has extensive connections to al-Qaeda, and the pull to jihad was too strong.”
“You Don’t Have to Prove to Anyone That You Did Right”
IRAQ, 2003 –2005—Once the Iraq War was in full swing, Rumsfeld directed General John Abizaid, the CENTCOM commander, to disband the separate High Value Task Forces JSOC was running in Afghanistan and Iraq, TF-5 and TF-20. Instead, JSOC would run one unified task force, TF-121, that would have jurisdiction to operate and hit in both countries. The logic was that “tracking and then capturing or killing Qaeda and Taliban leaders or fleeing members of the former Iraqi government required planning and missions not restricted by the lines on the map of a region where borders are porous.” It was a further blurring of the lines between “covert” and “clandestine” missions, but Rumsfeld had determined JSOC should forge ahead. In keeping with Rumsfeld’s drive to make Special Operations Forces the lead agency in the “global manhunt,” the task force would be run by McRaven and overseen by McChrystal, and they would have at their disposal the full range of US intelligence assets, including what was needed from the CIA. In addition to McRaven’s Navy SEALs and McChrystal’s Rangers, as well as members of Delta Force, the team would also have command over paramilitaries from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and support from the Activity, JSOC’s signals intelligence wing.
The days of JSOC operatives being regularly put on loan to the CIA were over. Cambone’s Strategic Support Branch and the Activity were coordinating the feeding of all-access intel to the task force. “This is tightening the sensor-to-shooter loop,” a senior defense official told the Washington Times. “You have your own intelligence right with the guys who do the shooting and grabbing. All the information under one roof.”
While TF-121 was given a mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein by the spring of 2004, Washington was increasingly focused on Iraq. Veteran intelligence officials identify this period as a turning point in the hunt for bin Laden. At a time when JSOC was asking for more resources and permissions to pursue targets inside of Pakistan and other countries, there was a tectonic shift toward making Iraq the numberone priority.
The heavy costs of that strategic redirection to the larger counterterrorism mission were of deep concern to Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a senior military intelligence officer who was CIA trained and had worked for the DIA and JSOC. Shaffer ran a task force, Stratus Ivy, that was part of a program started in the late 1990s code-named Able Danger. Utilizing what was then cutting-edge “data mining” technology, the program was operated by military intelligence and the Special Operations Command and aimed at identifying al Qaeda cells globally. Shaffer and some of his Able Danger colleagues claimed that they had uncovered several of the 9/11 hijackers a year before the attacks but that no action was taken against them. He told the 9/11 Commi
ssion he felt frustrated when the program was shut down and believed it was one of the few effective tools the United States had in the fight against al Qaeda pre-9/11. After the attacks, Shaffer volunteered for active duty and became the commander of the DIA’s Operating Base Alpha, which Shaffer said “conducted clandestine antiterrorist operations” in Africa. Shaffer was running the secret program, targeting al Qaeda figures who might flee Afghanistan and seek shelter in Somalia, Liberia and other African nations. It “was the first DIA covert action of the post–Cold War era, where my officers used an African national military proxy to hunt down and kill al Qaeda terrorists,” Shaffer recalled.
Like many other experienced intelligence officers who had been tracking al Qaeda prior to 9/11, Shaffer believed that the focus was finally placed correctly on destroying the terror network and killing or capturing its leaders. But then all resources were repurposed for the Iraq invasion. “I saw the Bush administration lunacy up close and personal,” Shaffer said. After a year and a half of running the African ops, “I was forced to shut down Operating Base Alpha so that its resources could be used for the Iraq invasion.”
Shaffer was reassigned as an intelligence planner on the DIA team that helped feed information on possible Iraqi WMD sites to the advance JSOC teams that covertly entered Iraq ahead of the invasion. “It yielded nothing,” he alleged. “As we now know, no WMD were ever found.” He believed that shifting the focus and resources to Iraq was a grave error that allowed bin Laden to continue operating for nearly another decade. Shaffer was eventually sent to Afghanistan, where he would clash with US military leaders over his proposals to run operations into Pakistan to target the al Qaeda leaders who were hiding there.
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