Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  Now that they owned the remote-killing weapon system, the agency had to gain waivers from target countries in order to use it. In 2004, when the CIA sought Pakistani permission to launch drone strikes in Pakistan, the price was the head of a militant young tribal strongman in Waziristan named Nek Muhammed Wazir who had infuriated the Pakistani military by repeatedly breaking truce agreements and humiliating forces sent to capture him—an early stage in the slow-burning Pashtun insurgency against Islamabad. Easily located thanks to his penchant for giving radio interviews via satellite phone, he was duly dispatched with a Hellfire on June 18, 2004, along with a number of fellow militants and two youths, aged sixteen and ten. By agreement, the Pakistanis took credit for the strike. Thereafter, the CIA was cleared to seek out victims but with restrictions. Only precisely identified high-value targets were to be hit, and there were to be no civilian casualties.

  Compared to what was to come, strikes in the early years in Pakistan were few and far between, a mere eleven between 2004 and the beginning of 2008. Nor was the tally of high-value targets impressive: one in 2004 (Nek Muhammed), two the following year, and two the year after that. There were none in 2007. Civilians, on the other hand, fared less well, with as many as 121 civilians, 82 of whom were accounted for in a single misconceived attack in 2006 on a madrassa, a religious school, in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. In keeping with agreed procedure, both U.S. and Pakistani spokesmen lied briskly, denying any American involvement. “It was completely done by the Pakistani military,” a U.S. military spokesman told reporters in Kabul, while a Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman claimed, “It is something that we have done and we have been doing for peace and security in our own region.” Within a week, a suicide bomber struck at a Pakistani police barracks near Islamabad, killing 42 and wounding 20. It was a lesson to the Pakistani government that collusion with drone strikes could bring unpleasant aftereffects.

  Meanwhile, despite the low-rate campaign, back at home the CIA was bolstering the assassination bureaucracy embedded in the Counterterrorism Center. As noted, the center, despite its lamentable performance prior to 9/11, had emerged from the disaster as “the most powerful institution in the country.” Cofer Black, its director at the time of the attacks, had endeared himself to President Bush with macho boasts that the attackers would soon “have flies crawling across their eyeballs” as he supervised the CIA’s descent into torture and rendition. His peers at the agency, concluding that Cofer was “out of control,” as one recalled to me, hoped that appointing José Rodríguez, deemed to be “more responsible,” as his deputy would compel some restraint on the theatrical Black. But Rodríguez, who took over as director when Black departed in 2002, was soon exhibiting the same behavior as Black, later becoming notorious as the principal apologist for torture. “Is Cofer some sort of vampire?” asked an exasperated senior official at the time. “Does he bite people and then they become like him?” Rodríguez was in turn succeeded in 2004 by a more polished agency veteran, Robert Grenier, who might be deemed an exception to the pattern since he was fired in 2006, reportedly for his opposition to prevailing policies on torture and rendition. But his opposition to torture was qualified. As he later wrote, “… the fact is that I supported continued use of harsh interrogation methods—notably excluding waterboarding” and cited “the clear effectiveness of our interrogation program.” (He was writing as part of a concerted campaign by former senior officials to denounce and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of the CIA torture program.) “Grenier was never really against torture,” one of his former colleagues remarked to me. “He just didn’t think it was being done the right way.”

  The rapid turnover ended with Grenier’s successor. Appointed in 2006, “Mike”—he chose to remain undercover and therefore, given the proclivity of the Obama Administration for prosecuting journalists, it seems wiser to omit his widely-known full name—was still in the post eight years later. Notoriously harsh on subordinates, “Mike” lived a monkish existence, rarely leaving his office, even to sleep (he kept a foldaway bed there), except to smoke in the courtyard. He retained the Shia faith adopted on his marriage to a Shia during an overseas posting earlier in his career. “As I understand it, she was pretty relaxed about the rules on alcohol and so on,” a former colleague recalled. “But he takes them more seriously than she ever did.”

  By common agreement among insiders, he was the unrelenting champion of the drone assassination program, successfully quashing any and all attempts to restrain it. His immense power rested in large part on his skills as a political operator, which enabled him to survive attempts by various CIA directors under whom he served to dismiss him. “They’ve tried several times,” a former senior agency official who worked with “Mike” told me. “But each time he goes to his allies in the White House and Capitol Hill, and it stops.”

  “I’ve had a lot of run-ins with the CIA; most of their people are pretty reasonable to deal with,” a former State Department official told me. “But not that guy. He’s scary.”

  At a time when America’s drone war generated ever-mounting comment and condemnation, very few people outside the innermost circles of the counterterrorist bureaucracy understood that the war was being directed by this strange, devout recluse, his influence indirectly reflected in headlines and graveyards far from Washington.

  By 2011 the Counterterrorism Center accounted for 10 percent of the agency’s entire workforce and occupied a large portion of available floor space at CIA headquarters, including a whole department assigned specifically to Pakistan and Afghanistan. (For public consumption, Alec Station, the unit set up in 1996 to hunt Osama bin Laden, was abolished in 2006. In fact, it was merely renamed but still dedicated to the pursuit of the number-one target.)

  Most significantly, one in every five of the agency’s intelligence analysts was now a targeter. Setting this development in stone in 2006, the agency designated targeting as a distinct career track, meaning that employees could garner raises and promotions without ever leaving the targeting field. This specialty had originally been conceived as devoted to the recruitment of agents. “There was an acronym we used,” a former agency official who helped develop the program told me. “‘SPADR,’ which stood for Spot, Assess, Develop, Recruit. We spent years getting the bureaucracy to approve it as a career track, and it came in just in time when we needed people to spot targets for strikes. It was the same skills. We’re not thinking about bloodthirsty butchers,” he cautioned, “these were ordinary people, soccer moms, who would come in to work on their vacations because they felt they were ‘saving lives.’”

  The budget for this inexorably expanding machine was a closely held secret, but by comparison, the FBI’s spending for counterterrorist operations in 2010 was $3.1 billion. Naturally, a multibillion-dollar budget needed more than two or three strikes a year in end results, but with irksome restrictions on hitting only clearly identified high-value targets, not to mention avoiding civilians, this would be hard to achieve. So it was in July 2008 that CIA Director Michael Hayden, a former air force intelligence general who came to the agency after heading NSA, went to the White House to make the case for a little loosening of the rules, as forcefully demanded by “Mike,” the powerful counterterror chief. With him went his deputy, Stephen Kappes.

  The pair knew just which buttons to press. Al-Qaeda, they told President Bush and his senior national security staff, had regrouped and was massing in the lawless frontier of northwest Pakistan. Despite the isolation of their lair, the “network” was weaving plots to strike across the globe. “After the next attack,” warned Hayden, “knowing what we know now, there’s no explaining it if we don’t do something.” Recounting his triumph afterward, the spy chief explained how he and Kappes “kept building and building the case of the safe havens. They were coming at us. They were a threat to the homeland.” In other words, as in every war since World War II—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Serbia—the target list had to be expanded,
after which victory would be assured.

  It was an easy sell. Bush rapidly agreed that henceforth the CIA could launch attacks with only the briefest warning to the Pakistanis. But Bush also gave his assent to an astonishingly far-reaching change. Henceforth, it would no longer be necessary to identify the target. Merely looking like a terrorist would be sufficient to trigger a strike. From now on, people could be killed on the basis of their behavior, as detected by various sensors: the unblinking eyes of the Predators and Reapers or the ears of the phone-monitoring networks of the NSA. Thus the notorious “signature strike” based on “patterns of life” was officially sanctified.

  Forty years earlier, when Hayden had been a very junior air force officer, the targeters of Task Force Alpha had relied on sensors scattered throughout the Laotian jungles to detect patterns, such as a sequence of engine noises and slight earth movements that denoted an enemy truck convoy or urine smells and scattered conversations that might indicate a column of troops. After four decades the theater had shifted from dense jungle to the barren hills of the northwest frontier, but the concept was the same: a belief that enemy behavior was so well understood that the targeters knew what to look for, such as the unique features of an al-Qaeda convoy or a terrorist meeting or a particular pattern of phone calls. Once a telltale pattern was detected, the target could be destroyed without further investigation. As with the Predator pilot who thought that washing and praying at dawn was a sure Taliban giveaway, the accuracy of the pattern was all-important. Among the elements that could combine for a lethal signature was a man’s mode of urinating. Someone informed the targeters that while Pashtun men urinate standing up, Arab men squat. This then became a means of identifying Arab al-Qaeda otherwise indistinguishable from their Pashtun colleagues and was duly incorporated in the targeting algorithms.

  The immediate effects of Hayden’s successful solicitation were dramatic. Drone strikes on the frontier took off, with thirty-two in the second half of 2009 alone. Then, as of January 20, 2009, a new commander in the drone wars appeared. Though the idealistic youths who had campaigned so hard for him in his presidential run may not have noticed, Barack Obama had quietly signaled early in his campaign that his view on high-value targeting was entirely orthodox. “It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005,” he told a Washington think-tank audience in August 2007, referring to a planned SEAL commando raid on an alleged high-level enemy meeting in Waziristan, aborted at the last minute by Donald Rumsfeld. Interestingly, these bellicose remarks were guided by Richard Clarke, the Clinton-era “terror czar” who had lobbied forcefully for the development of the lethal Predator drone. Those national security insiders who took solace in the candidate’s militant stance would not be disappointed.

  On January 23, 2009, just three days after Obama was inaugurated, two separate drone strikes in North and South Waziristan authorized by the new president and relayed via John Brennan killed up to twenty-five people, including possibly as many as twenty civilians. Neither strike hit its intended high-value targets. The second killed a local elder and member of a progovernment peace committee named Malik Gukistan Khan along with four members of his family. Khan’s brother later told human rights researchers from Columbia Law School, “We did nothing, have no connection to militants at all. Our family supported the government … no one has accepted responsibility for this incident so far.” Some in Washington took a cynical view of the CIA’s eagerness to involve the new president in a strike. “He’s been blooded, just like you would a hunting dog,” a former White House official remarked to me at the time. Afterward, when Hayden and Kappes explained the concept of a signature strike—targeting people who look like terrorists—to the chief executive, Obama reportedly snapped, “That’s not good enough for me.” But he authorized them to continue all the same.

  The strikes not only continued, they doubled and redoubled. There were 52 in all of 2009 and 128 in 2010. According to a rare outside observer, the New York Times journalist David Rhode, held hostage in North Waziristan between November 2008 and June 2009, life became “hell on earth.” After 7 months in captivity, he recalled the terror of life under drones: “From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.”

  Under the onslaught, patterns of life began to change. People, for example, tried not to gather in large groups, fearful of displaying a potentially lethal signature. Following the attack on the jirga at Datta Khel, this form of community activity, integral to tribal culture, fell into disuse. Wedding parties, one of the few forms of social entertainment permitted in this straitlaced society, also disappeared. A relative of one of the March 17 victims later described how “We do not come out of our villages because it’s very dangerous to go out anywhere.… In past we used to participate in activities like wedding gatherings [and] different kinds of jirgas, different kinds of funerals.… We used to go to different houses for condolences, and there were all kinds of activities in the past and we used to participate. But now it’s a risk to go to any place or participate in any activities.”

  Back in Washington, the administration maintained stoutly that civilian casualties were nonexistent or minimal (though of course death by drone for a military-aged male brought involuntary posthumous enlistment, according to U.S. methodology, as a “militant”). No remotely objective tabulation of the civilian death count in the Obama years has suggested that the drones were killing more civilians than al-Qaeda or Taliban members, but the ordinary inhabitants in the kill zone of the tribal territories clearly understood that the strikes were not precise, that anyone could unwittingly display the wrong signature. Had the drones struck only “deserving” targets, innocents would have known that and gone happily to their neighbors’ weddings and funerals without fear.

  Drone partisans naturally hailed the universal precision of their weapons. As David Deptula said to me, “We can now hit any target anywhere in the world, any time, any weather, day or night.” Strikes were certainly a perfect instrument of effects-based operations in removing the terrorists of various descriptions who lurked in the midst of tribal society. But the effects of hundreds of strikes, concentrated in an area the size of Maryland, were anything but precise. In fact, they devastated the life of the society as comprehensively as if it had been subjected to a World War II–style carpet bombing but in ways that would be invisible to distant spectators peering at their Predator feeds. Thus the “double-tap” tactic of reserving a second missile for rescuers converging to help victims of an initial strike put a crimp on the generosity of ordinary citizens, not to mention the Red Cross, which ordered its people to stay away from a house or car hit by drones for at least six hours. The sole survivor of Obama’s first strike, a youth named Faheem Qureshi, felt that he survived only because he was able to walk out of the burning house on his own; none of his neighbors would have dared approach. Similarly, because there have been strikes on funerals, people are wary of funeral processions and other ceremonies of collective grieving. In a further general effect on the population at large, the cost of travel and shipping goods soared as truck and taxi drivers grew fearful of the risks of being hit on the road.

  Meanwhile, the increased rate of drone strikes inside Pakistan from mid-2008 was not due solely to the advent of signature strikes. The growing scale of the Tehrik-i-Taliban—the Pakistani Taliban known as TTP—insurgency against the government in Islamabad encouraged the Pakistanis to solicit further U.S. help in eliminating their domestic enemies. In return, they were prepared to assist in targeting what they considered “good” Taliban groups that reserved their energies for attacking Americans in Afghanistan. At the same time, by dint of unstinting effort and large amounts of cash, the CIA had recruited agents among the tribal popu
lations of Waziristan to assist them in nominating and locating targets. Combining traditional spy craft with modern technology, at least some of these agents were equipped with a geolocation device (really just a SIM card with a transmitter) that could be used by a drone for targeting purposes. Clearly, whoever possessed one of these devices held the power of life and death over anyone they chose. They could plant it in the home of an al-Qaeda terrorist or that of a neighbor with whom they were on bad terms. The drones need not discriminate. However many of the devices were actually deployed, their existence naturally induced paranoia among a population fearful that an argument over a broken fence or the price of a sheep might bring a missile down on their heads.

  Quite apart from such neighborly differences, the empowerment of local agents to call in a strike put a powerful weapon in the hands of two rival tribes in Waziristan, the Mehsud and the Wazirs. The Mehsud, hailing from South Waziristan and so ferocious even by local standards that the British had dubbed them “wolves,” fell into open warfare with the Pakistani state and pursued an unbridled campaign of bombings, shootings, and beheadings across the country in the name of the TTP. Meanwhile, their rivals, the Wazirs, in North Waziristan, were at peace with the Pakistani government and were primarily concerned with assisting their tribal brethren fighting the Americans across the border in Afghanistan. Thus the CIA targeters were less interested in the Mehsud, until, that is, a routine NSA phone intercept in May 2009 picked up someone discussing the fact that Baitullah Mehsud, the vicious, semiliterate, but capable thug who had created and led the TTP, had a nuclear weapon. When another conversation on the topic of Islamic doctrine regarding the use of such weapons surfaced, Washington went into (secret) convulsions. Even when it was concluded that the device was merely a “dirty bomb”—radioactive nuclear waste wrapped around explosives—the level of hysteria remained high. “We got played all the time,” a former CIA operations officer told me. “All the other side had to do was to have a conversation on the phone talking in some kind of mysterious code about an upcoming ‘wedding party’ and we’d go on red alert.”