A video from 2005 shows Storm attending a speech given by radical Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed in London. Storm claimed he met Awlaki a year later in Sana’a. At the time Storm was a student at Iman University, where Awlaki was taking classes and delivering lectures. Storm claimed he and Awlaki “talked freely to each other” in the months that led up to Awlaki’s arrest and developed a friendship. While Awlaki was imprisoned, Storm said he began to have a change of heart about the version of Islam he was practicing: “I found out that what I believed in was, unfortunately, not what I thought it was.” Storm claimed he approached the Danish Intelligence Service, PET, and offered his assistance. He said he was introduced to British intelligence representatives and the CIA. The PET, he claimed, assigned him a handler.
When Awlaki was released from prison, Storm became a potentially important asset for the CIA. The CIA and the PET “knew that Anwar saw me as his friend and confidant. They knew that I could reach him, and find out where he stayed,” Storm said in an interview with Denmark’s second-largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Storm claimed that Danish intelligence officials provided him with money “to bring materials and electronic equipment” to Awlaki. According to Storm, the CIA wanted to install a tracking device in the equipment he was providing to Awlaki, making it possible for the Americans to monitor and potentially kill the cleric with a drone strike.
In September 2009, Storm returned to Yemen and traveled to Shabwah Province, where Awlaki was in hiding. Storm said he stayed at the home of someone he described as an al Qaeda sympathizer in Shabwah. Storm alleged that when he met with Awlaki, he asked Storm to get hold of some solar panels or a transportable refrigerator, materials he could use to cool explosives parts. “We also discussed the terrorist attacks. He had some plans that would hit large shopping centers in the West or elsewhere with many people with poison attacks,” Storm alleged. Storm’s claims cannot be independently verified, but he definitely passed them on to the CIA at a time when the United States was building a case against Awlaki.
I asked Awlaki’s father about Storm’s allegations. “I don’t believe many things he said about Anwar,” Nasser said. “I think this man was part of a conspiracy to get Anwar—the man and the character—in order to reduce or eliminate his influence on Muslim men and women around the world. So, America and Denmark found a guy who was all his life an evil man and committed an armed robbery when he was only thirteen years old. Anwar, during his forty years in this life, never was involved in any act of violence against any person or group.”
What is indisputable is that Awlaki asked Storm to find him an additional wife. Awlaki had married a second Yemeni wife while he was on the run and had a daughter with her. But this time, he specifically wanted a white Muslim convert to act as his “companion in hiding,” Storm claimed. “He asked if I knew a woman from the West he could marry. I think that he lacked someone who could better understand his Western mindset,” Storm told the Danish paper. Storm agreed to help. “There are two things that I would like to stress,” Awlaki allegedly wrote Storm in a late 2009 e-mail, which he asked Storm to relay to a potential bride. “The first is that I don’t live in a fixed location. Therefore my living conditions vary widely. Sometimes I even live in a tent. Second, because of my security situation I sometimes have to seclude myself, which means me and my family would not meet with any persons for extended periods. If you can live in difficult conditions, do not mind loneliness and can live with restrictions on your communications with others then alhamdulillah [thanks be to God] that is great.”
When Storm returned to Copenhagen, he met with CIA and PET officials. He said he was shown satellite images of the area where he had been in Shabwah and he identified the home where he had stayed. Yemeni forces launched an assault on the house a short time later, but Awlaki had already moved on. The owner of the home was killed. Storm had also told them about Awlaki’s desire to find a Western wife. In that request, the CIA saw opportunity. The American agents, he said, were “overjoyed.” Along with agents from the PET, Storm claimed, the CIA came up with a plan. “The idea was to find someone who shared [Awlaki’s] ideology and mentality so that both of them would be killed in an American drone attack,” Storm said. “I helped the CIA and PET track Anwar so the Americans could send a drone after him. That was the plan.”
Blowback in Somalia
SOMALIA AND WASHINGTON, DC, 2009 —As summer 2009 began, JSOC was well aware of the fact that the men they had identified as the most dangerous threats to US interests in East Africa, Saleh Ali Nabhan and Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, were still at large. The latter was believed to have undergone plastic surgery, and intelligence analysts could only guess his exact whereabouts. The trail on both men had gone largely cold as al Shabab spread its areas of control in Somalia, giving them more options to hide or operate discreetly.
US intelligence believed that Nabhan had become more deeply embedded within al Shabab’s operations since the overthrow of the ICU and was running three training camps that produced several suicide bombers, including a US citizen. A secret diplomatic cable from the Nairobi Embassy noted, “Since Nabhan’s selection as senior trainer for al-Shabab’s training in summer 2008, the flow of foreigners to Somalia has broadened to encompass fighters from south Asia, Europe, and North America, Sudan, and East Africa, particularly trainees from Kenya.” Those fighters would, according to the cable, travel to Mogadishu to fight against the US-backed African Union and Somali government forces. The “camps continue to generate increasing quantities of foreign graduates,” it concluded.
Washington was desperate to take Nabhan out and in July 2009, US intelligence facilitated a potential breakthrough. That month, Kenyan security forces burst through the door of the home of a young Kenyan of Somali descent named Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, who was living in Eastleigh, the congested Somali slum in Nairobi. The next night, Hassan’s captors took him to Wilson Airport: “They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane,” Hassan recalled, according to a statement from Hassan provided to me by a human rights investigator. “In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the sea-shore.” From there, Hassan was taken to a secret prison in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency, where he was interrogated by US intelligence officials. An intelligence report leaked by the Kenyan Anti-Terrorism Police Unit alleged that “Ahmed Abdulahi Hassan aka Anas” was a “former personal assistant to Nabhan” and “was injured while fighting near the presidential palace in Mogadishu in 2009.” He was viewed as a high-value prisoner. “I have been interrogated so many times,” Hassan alleged in the statement, which was smuggled from the prison and provided to me. “Interrogated by Somali men and white men. Every day new faces show up.”
On the campaign trail and after becoming president, Barack Obama pledged that the United States would no longer use certain Bush-era torture and detention tactics. CIA director Leon Panetta had stated in April 2009 that the “CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites” and announced a “plan to decommission the remaining sites.” Yet three months later, Hassan found himself in a secret prison being interrogated by Americans.
According to a US official who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, Hassan was not directly rendered from Kenya to Somalia by the US government. But, the official said, “The United States provided information which helped get Hassan—a dangerous terrorist—off the street.” That description supported the theory that Kenyan forces were rendering suspects on behalf of the United States and other governments. Another well-informed source said that Hassan had been targeted in Nairobi because of intelligence suggesting that he was the “right-hand man” of Nabhan, then the presumed head of al Qaeda in East Africa.
Two months after Hassan was rendered to the secret prison in Mogadishu, on September 14, 2009, a JSOC team took off in helicopters from an aircraft carrier p
ositioned off the Somali coast and penetrated Somali airspace. The man they were stalking, they learned from recently obtained “actionable” intelligence, had been making regular trips between the port cities of Merca and Kismayo, near the Kenyan border. On this day, their target was traveling in a Land Cruiser, supported by several technicals. According to witnesses, the helicopters “buzzed” over a rural village en route to the convoy. In broad daylight, the JSOC team attacked the convoy from the helicopters, gunning down the people inside. The American commandos then landed and collected at least two of the bodies. One of them was later confirmed to be that of Saleh Ali Nabhan. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would not comment on “any alleged operation in Somalia,” nor would the White House. That day, when al Shabab confirmed that Nabhan, five other foreigners and three Somali al Shabab fighters had been killed in the attack, there was little room for doubt. JSOC had taken down their most-wanted man in East Africa in the first known targeted killing operation inside of Somalia authorized by President Obama.
To veteran counterterrorism operators, like Malcolm Nance, the Nabhan hit was an example of what the United States should have done instead of backing the Ethiopian invasion. “I am a firm believer in targeted assassinations when they are people who are no longer of value to your collection processes. If they are too strong for your ability to negate their capacity in the battlefield, then you are just going to have to put a Hellfire in ’em,” Nance told me. “We were much more successful using the surgical strikes, where we went in—to tell you the truth, very Israeli-like—and we did the drone strike, and/or Hellfire strike and we blasted the individual car of a known guy who was known to be in that vehicle. We flew in, we snatched his body, we confirmed it, we got the intelligence and went away. That’s the way we should be doing it. We could have been doing that for the [preceding] ten years.”
The Nabhan strike won Obama much praise from the counterterrorism and Special Ops community, but in other circles it raised serious questions about the emerging bipartisan consensus on assassinations, renditions and secret prisons. “These are like summary executions,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staffer who worked on oversight for SOCOM from 2001 to 2008. “Who’s giving authority? Who’s making the [target] lists? Is it a kill or capture [mission], or is it a kill mission?” Candidate Obama laid out a vision of how he would radically depart from the policies of the Bush era, but in the Nabhan case he relied on some of the most controversial of them. “Has our policy shifted at all since the previous administration?” Farkas asked. “My sense is ‘no.’”
Jack Goldsmith, who served as an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, said that the belief that “the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric.”
While declaring an end to the secret prisons, Obama and his counterterrorism team found a backdoor way of continuing them. In Somalia, the CIA had begun using the secret underground prison where Hassan was held as a center to interrogate suspected al Shabab or al Qaeda prisoners there. Although not technically run by the United States, American agents would be free to interrogate the prisoners. Lawyers retained by the family of Hassan, the alleged right-hand man of Nabhan, saw his case as showcasing a slightly cleaned-up continuation of Bush’s detention policies. “Hassan’s case suggests that the US may be involved in a decentralized, out-sourced Guantánamo Bay in central Mogadishu,” his family’s Kenyan legal team asserted, noting that Hassan had not been provided access to lawyers, his family or the Red Cross. It would also soon be clear that Hassan was not the only prisoner being held in Somalia’s underground secret prison—and that Washington’s role in that prison was not limited to occasional interrogations of high-value detainees.
With Nabhan gone, Fazul became the most senior al Qaeda figure known to be operating in Somalia. Although al Shabab had suffered two major blows at the hands of JSOC, it was hardly undeterred. Its asymmetric battle was just beginning. Nabhan’s death, like so many of Washington’s most passionately embraced “strategic” victories in Somalia, would result in blowback. Even when perfectly executed, targeted strikes had the potential to help bolster the ranks of insurgent groups and provide them with martyrs to be emulated. By the end of 2009, at least seven US citizens had died fighting on behalf of al Shabab and scores of others were believed to be among the group’s ranks and in its training camps preparing for future action. Although al Shabab was unable to strike directly at the United States, it was showing that it could recruit American citizens and wreak havoc on its puppets and proxies in Mogadishu. In the process, al Shabab would draw the United States, the African Union and the Somali government into a potentially disastrous replay of the CIA warlord era, mixed with the worst excesses of the Ethiopian occupation period.
OF COURSE, the Obama administration saw developments in Somalia differently. Following the perfectly executed assassination of the Somali pirates, President Obama’s relationship with JSOC and its commander, Admiral McRaven, deepened. The administration carefully reviewed the existing orders issued by President Bush that authorized US military forces to strike at terrorists wherever they resided, the “world is a battlefield” doctrine developed by Stephen Cambone and other architects of the war on terror. They decided that they wanted such authority expanded. Defense Secretary Gates and Obama’s newly appointed CIA Director, Leon Panetta, worked diligently to bridge the CIA-JSOC divide, which, fueled by Rumsfeld and Cheney, had persisted during the Bush administration. Obama wanted a seamless counterterrorism machine. After the Nabhan strike, then–CENTCOM commander David Petraeus issued his update to the AQN-Execute Order, giving US military forces, particularly those from JSOC, far greater latitude to operate in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. Asymmetric attacks that had been relatively infrequent during the Bush administration—with Iraq as a draining focus of counterterrorism attention—would become the focal point of Obama’s rebranded global war.
During his first year in office, President Obama and his advisers endeavored to reframe US counterterrorism policy as a more comprehensive, full-spectrum effort to reduce extremism, largely based on regional security. Defense Secretary Gates summed up the purported stance of top civilian and military officials in the Obama administration when he stated in April 2009 that there would not be a “purely military solution” to piracy or civil war in Somalia. The US approach to Somalia would have to shift away from containment. “The National Security Council has brought together the Department of State, the Department of Defense, USAID, the intelligence community, and a variety of other agencies to work to develop a strategy that is both comprehensive and sustainable,” noted Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson on May 20, 2009, during an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Increasing assistance to the Somali government and AMISOM would be priorities, but the major focus remained targeting the leadership of al Shabab and al Qaeda.
The priorities laid out in Obama’s first annual budget request earlier in May were telling: the president continued the arc of a militarized Africa policy, while increasing security assistance to African states. The budget, noted Daniel Volman, director of the African Security Research Project, showed “the administration is following the course laid down for AFRICOM by the Bush administration, rather than putting these programs on hold until it can conduct a serious review of US security policy towards Africa.” The US request for arms sales to Africa went up to $25.6 million, from $8.3 million in fiscal year 2009, including $2.5 million set aside for Djibouti, $3 million for Ethiopia, and $1 million for Kenya. Military training programs to those countries expanded as well. Further spending was proposed for Camp Lemonnier, as well as naval assets for security operations in the Indian Ocean. In addition to the d
rone capability at Camp Lemonnier, the Obama administration reached a deal with the government of the Seychelles to position a fleet of MQ-9 Reaper drones there beginning in September 2009. Although the stated purpose of the drones was for unarmed surveillance to support counterpiracy operations, US counterterrorism officials began pushing for the drones to be weaponized and used in the hunt for al Shabab. “It would be a mistake to assume that Obama will not take further military action if the situation in Somalia escalates,” Volman concluded. He was right.
As Obama’s national security team began mapping out a new, lethal strategy to deal with al Shabab in Somalia and AQAP in Yemen, al Shabab was also reorganizing. Fazul had taken over for Nabhan and was deeply embedded within the al Shabab leadership structure. By late 2009, al Shabab had benefited tremendously from the Ethiopian invasion. “Now we are dealing with a group that’s in there and they are entrenched,” Nance told me. By September 2009, the AMISOM force in Mogadishu had expanded to 5,200 troops from just over 1,700, thanks in large part to increased funding and support from Washington. In the aftermath of Nabhan’s death, there were rumors that the AMISOM force was preparing for a post-Ramadan offensive against al Shabab later in the year.
After Nabhan was killed, al Shabab operatives stole two UN Land Cruisers from central Somalia and brought them to Mogadishu. On September 17, the al Shabab agents drove the vehicles up to the gates of Mogadishu’s international airport, where the AMISOM forces were meeting at their base with Somali security officials. They positioned the Land Cruisers outside the offices of a US private security contractor and a fuel depot. The UN vehicles exploded in a spectacular, stealth suicide bombing. In the end, more than twenty people were killed in the attack, seventeen of them African Union troops. Among the dead was the deputy commander of the AMISOM force, Major General Juvenal Niyoyunguruza of Burundi. “This was very tactical,” an AMISOM official told the New York Times. “It’s like these guys had a map of the place.” It was the single deadliest attack against AMISOM since it arrived in Somalia in 2007.
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