Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  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 Tali
ban, 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 hav
e 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.