Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  As drone strikes by one or the other of these agencies ramped up, from two in 2009 to four in 2010, ten in 2011, to forty-one in 2012, ordinary Yemenis would experience a lesson in drone warfare all too often lost on far-off officials who authorize the killings: though it may appear that drones offer a remote, sanitized mode of warfare, to their victims they are very much a local affair, a fact that was forcefully impressed on Jaber al-Shabwani, the deputy governor of Marib Province, in May 2010.

  Given the closely woven texture of Yemeni family and tribal connections, it should have come as no surprise that al-Shabwani was a cousin of Ayed al-Shabwani, a prominent local al-Qaeda leader. Jaber was also a business partner of a Saleh relative who held a very important position in the security services and with whom he was now in dispute over a matter of $9 million owed him by the Saleh relative. On May 24, Jaber al-Shabwani, accompanied by his uncle, two of his sons, and several bodyguards, went to meet his cousin in hopes of getting him to lay down his arms. A few minutes into the meeting came the distant but unmistakable sound of a drone, whereupon the al-Qaeda Shabwani made a rapid departure. The deputy governor stayed put on the reasonable but mistaken assumption that no one would want to target him. He was wrong. The exploding missile, most likely targeted at his cell phone, killed him, his uncle, and two of his bodyguards, and injured his sons. In Washington, the realization dawned that someone (in this case, the Joint Special Operations Command) had fed the targeters very incorrect information that, according to one report, “may have been intended to result in Mr. Shabwani’s death.” Obama gave his influential adviser, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, a “chest thumping,” by the latter’s account, angrily asking, “How could this happen?” Brennan, meanwhile, was “pissed,” and demanding to know why a deputy governor was meeting with al-Qaeda. If anyone in Washington knew about the $9 million, they kept it to themselves.

  This mistargeted killing had more far-reaching consequences than most, since Shabwani’s father, Sheikh Ali al-Shabwani, led members of his tribe in blowing up a section of the vital trans-Yemen oil pipeline in retaliation, leading to millions of dollars in lost revenue for the treasury. Chastened, Washington suspended drone operations in Yemen for a year. Supposedly, when operations resumed, the CIA was playing a greater role and strikes were no longer quite so reliant on Saleh and his cronies for targeting intelligence. But Yemenis may not have noticed the difference, since people were still picked off either in error or as collateral damage. In many cases, security forces could easily have arrested the victims instead of having them summarily incinerated by Hellfire.

  Anwar al-Awlaki, for example, billed for a time as “the most dangerous man in the world,” was publicly nominated to the CIA’s kill list in April 2011. Awlaki had already retreated to the heartland of his tribe, the Awalik. It was easy to believe that the fugitive was hidden in the desert fastness, but in fact, as Guardian reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad discovered when he visited the tribe’s ruling Sultan, although everyone in the neighborhood knew where the notorious preacher was living, no one seemed interested in arresting him. “The government haven’t asked us to hand him in,” Sultan Fareed bin Babaker told the reporter. “If they do then we will think about it. But no one has asked us.”

  A few weeks before this conversation took place, a pair of Justice Department lawyers in Washington had obligingly provided the Obama administration with a secret legal justification for summarily executing Awlaki, accepting as a premise that he posed an “imminent” threat and that his capture was “infeasible.” The July 16, 2010, memorandum, which the New York Times later described as “a slapdash pastiche of legal theories … clearly tailored to the desired result,” invoked, among other precedents, a 2006 Israeli court decision on targeted killing. The Israeli Supreme Court did indeed rule in December 2006 that “targeted preventions” would be legal in certain cases, when absolutely necessary to prevent a “ticking bomb” scenario but not otherwise. However, as revealed by Anat Kamm, an Israeli whistle-blower who copied documents while serving in the IDF, the Israeli military routinely disregarded the judgment when making targeting decisions. Kamm was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for her action.

  Awlaki was finally killed by a CIA drone in September 2011 and his son, Abdul Rahman, by a JSOC drone two weeks later. The boy died because he and seven others happened to be having dinner at a restaurant where a high-value al-Qaeda target, Ibrahim al-Banna, was thought to be eating, it evidently being the targeters’ assumption that any fellow diners were guilty by culinary association.

  Anwar al-Awlaki had been a prime target thanks to his connection to two failed attempts to explode bombs on American planes, not to mention his mentoring of Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist accused of killing thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009. But although the direct threat to “the homeland” apparently receded with his elimination, the pace of U.S. attacks on Yemeni targets only increased. In 2011, President Saleh, faced with massive protests against his misrule, withdrew his forces from the southern province of Abyan, a center of southern separatism in which al-Qaeda had gained a strong foothold. To those who knew him, this was a typical Saleh ploy. As Abdul Ghani al-Iryani, a well-known political analyst in Sana’a, stated flatly at the time: “The regime decided to hand over this territory to [al-Qaeda] to underline the risk of terrorism in the eyes of the west. That didn’t really work, except that it created a very dangerous situation for the population. So, the regime hands over the land, the territory, to the extremists and then starts bombing them with all kinds of weapons.” The hapless inhabitants of this miserably poor enclave found themselves lumped in with al-Qaeda under a rain of bombs and Hellfire missiles unleashed by the United States but for which the Yemeni government, corrupt, repressive, hated, was happy to take responsibility.

  Saleh’s Abyan ploy did not save his presidency, although he did get to keep all that neatly stacked cash in the basement. His replacement, Abd Rubbah Mansour Hadi, continued many of the same policies, including, at least for a while, wholehearted endorsement of the drone strikes. Many of those being hunted were no doubt al-Qaeda officials in good standing, even if their international impact was limited, but the targeting of people who could easily have been arrested persisted. Al-Qaeda member Hamid al-Radmi, for example, was incinerated in his car in central Yemen in April 2013 by three missiles even though he was in frequent contact with security and political officials as a mediator. Adnan al-Qadhi, a colonel in an elite army unit who was clearly sympathetic to al-Qaeda, was killed although he lived and moved openly in a village on the edge of Sana’a that was home to many of the country’s ruling elite. “They could have picked him up any time, but he was a relative of Ali Mohsen [a very important commander]. It would have been too embarrassing to arrest a relative,” one Sanani explained to me, “so Ali Mohsen said ‘let the Americans kill him.’”

  Inevitably, collateral victims accumulated; the driver and his cousin whose taxi passengers were two targeted al-Qaeda members or the twelve passengers in a minibus, including three children and a pregnant woman, on their way home from market in the central highland town of Rada’a in September 2012, burned so badly their bodies were unrecognizable, or the anti–al-Qaeda preacher, Salim bin Ali Jaber, killed in August 2012 along with his cousin, village policeman Walid bin Ali Jaber, while arguing with three targeted suspects. “If Salim and Walid are al-Qaeda,” chanted infuriated villagers as they marched through the village four days after the strike, “then we are all al-Qaeda.”

  The villagers also chanted, “Obama, this is wrong,” a point with which the president should have agreed, at least after May 23, 2013, when the White House issued “U.S. Policy Standards and Procedures for the Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.” This document stated clearly and unequivocally: “[L]ethal force will be used only to prevent or stop attacks on U.S. persons, and even then, only when capture is not feasible.” Moreover, �
�the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” and only when there was a “near certainty that non-combatants will not be killed or injured.”

  It all depended on what was meant by “imminent.” Over fifteen days in the summer of 2013 the United States hit Yemen with nine strikes, killing as many as forty-nine people, including up to seven civilians, three of whom were children. Officials told the New York Times that intelligence of a possible terrorist threat (in the form of an intercepted dispatch from al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri instructing his lieutenant in Yemen, Nasir al Wuhayshi, to “do something”) had “expanded the scope of people we could go after” and that none of those killed in the stepped-up strikes were “household names.” Rather, they were “rising stars” who could become future leaders. An unnamed official was quoted as explaining: “Before, we couldn’t necessarily go after a driver for the organization; it’d have to be an operations director. Now that driver becomes fair game because he’s providing direct support to the plot.”

  Clearly, things had come a very long way since George Bush had begun crossing out names in the list he kept in his desk drawer. A well-funded bureaucratic mechanism to service the “disposition matrix,” as the kill list had been euphemistically relabeled, was centered at the National Counterterrorism Center, whose 500-strong staff was charged with, among other things, collating the various lists crafted by the CIA and JSOC and others. (As noted, the president liked to have the very last word. “Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” he remarked the day Awlaki died. “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”) John Brennan, who moved from the White House to take formal command of the CIA in 2013, was credited with having overseen the crafting of this elaborate and complex system, a monument to the principle of “precise precision” while nominating people far away for execution. In reality, this arrangement illustrated how faithfully twenty-first-century assassination practices followed the hoary traditions of strategic bombing, in which “targeting committees” had long labored to discern “critical nodes,” remorselessly expanding target lists in the process.

  In April 2014, Western media took notice of an al-Qaeda rally—a party to welcome twenty-nine fellow jihadis who had broken out of jail in Sana’a in February—that had taken place somewhere in Yemen the month before. As shown in an al-Qaeda video, many hundreds of armed, chanting, cheerful-looking fighters paraded through a canyon and stood in long lines to greet a smiling Nasir al-Wuhayshi. No one appeared concerned that they might be under surveillance by the “unblinking eye.” Coincidentally or not, this striking demonstration of jihadi insouciance was immediately followed, once the video reached a wider audience, by multiple drone strikes in several southern provinces. As many as sixty-five people, including at least three children, died over three days.

  Despite the intensity of the attacks, no one in authority was able to name a single one of the victims, nor were there any official leaks or even hints that the attacks were aimed at foiling any threat, imminent or otherwise, to “U.S. persons.” The White House off-loaded the chore of commenting on the strikes to the Yemeni government, which duly followed orders in claiming responsibility. Reports from Sana’a indicated that the Yemeni regime had been hoping to persuade the United States to limit the strikes that provided al-Qaeda with such an effective recruiting tool, but such pleas from a feeble client regime could easily be brushed aside.

  In any event, there were fresh opportunities beckoning for drone warfare, not just traditional operations in benighted regions of the third world, such as North Africa, but against more formidable enemies. This in turn offered new challenges and the alluring prospect of enhanced budgets.

  13

  ONE BIG ROBOT

  “We want to be everywhere, know everything, and we want to predict what happens next,” declared an earnest Lieutenant General Joseph Votel, commander of JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in April 2014. Twenty years after promoters of the revolution in military affairs first promised a world of networked and omniscient precision, the dream lived on. Votel was addressing “GeoInt,” the well-funded annual Florida jamboree that brings together surveillance-industry executives with their intelligence agency customers for a week of mutually profitable confabulation. The general’s words drew respectful attention, for the night-raiding JSOC was one of the few entities relatively secure from the famine eating into budgets and revenues across the U.S. defense establishment. While most public defense forums echoed with lamentations of the “painful choices” engendered by the legally mandated cuts in defense spending known as sequestration, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), of which JSOC is a key and especially secretive component, had seen its upwardly curving budget survive almost undisturbed.

  Incoming Obama administration officials inspecting the national security system bequeathed them by the Bush-Cheney team in 2009 told me at the time that “Special Operations are out of control,” and the intervening years had done little to change the picture. Operating in at least 134 countries, empowered to kill people without recourse to higher authority, endowed with “unique acquisition authority” to spend money with a minimum of congressional oversight, the “point of the spear,” as the special operators liked to refer to themselves, had grown from a 1980 force of 11,600 specialists focused on strengthening third world allies into 2013’s 66,000-person machine. From a mere $2.3 billion in 2001, the command, which extracts its budget directly from Congress, had garnered $9.3 billion in 2008, $10.3 billion in 2011, and was looking for $9.9 billion in 2015, the slight decline due to the drawdown of Afghan war operations. Such generosity to the heavily publicized “secret” warriors that had cut down bin Laden, Zarqawi, and others had endowed SOCOM with a prosperous sheen. Streams of congressional delegations invited to visit the headquarters in Tampa, Florida, marveled at the gleaming modern buildings and lavish accoutrements. “They have professional lighting engineers for the displays they put on to show us what they are doing around the world,” one awestruck house staffer told me on his return.

  Unquestioning largesse had generated the inevitable result. “When SEAL Team 6 operators are sent on ‘training’ missions to Alaska to go hunting on the government’s dime, you know you have budgets that are both too fat and lack oversight,” one member of the elite force told a reporter. “If [SOCOM Commander Admiral William] McRaven is concerned with his budget, he should start with fighting the wartime tradition of fiscal abuse that has gone unchecked since 9/11 in the SOF community. Our love affair with special operations has caused the DOD to turn a blind eye on very questionable fiscal practices.” Nevertheless, there was little sign that the high-tech assassins were falling out of favor, though Congress did raise some questions about a scheme for a “National Capital Region Headquarters” with a $10 million annual budget as well as an $80 million project, championed by McRaven, to develop an “Iron Man” battle suit for the commandos. TALOS, the battery-powered “tactical-assault light operator suit,” featured full-body bulletproof protection as well as muscle-boosting components, embedded computers, night vision, and video sensors for “increased situational awareness” (with a slick, expensive, gamelike video to promote the project). Among other items on a Special Operations wish list for Advancement of Technologies in Equipment for Use by U.S. Special Operations Forces issued shortly after Votel’s address, was a “Concealable/Take Down Urban Sniper Rifle” folded into a small 12-by-20-inch suitcase, guided bullets, and tiny missiles as well as “neutraceutical and/or pharmacological enhancements to increase neuroperformance.”

  Another McRaven initiative, that of building a $15 million “regional SOF coordination center” in Colombia, ran into concerted opposition from the other services, who complained to Congress. Special Operations has been heavily engaged in Colombia since the Clinton era in combating the venerable FARC Marxist guerrilla insurgency. In recent years this campaign has been promoted as the textbook example of high-value
targeting powered by precise electronic intelligence, a strategy that had clearly failed in Afghanistan but was hailed as having enjoyed great success in Colombia.

  Conducted in conjunction with the CIA, the ongoing operation followed the traditional pattern of the recent Asian wars. Targeted leaders of FARC were tracked by NSA via their cell phones or covertly planted tracking devices. Once located, they were struck, not by drone-fired missiles but by 500-pound GPS-guided bombs dropped from Vietnam-era light A-37 bombers provided to Colombia by the United States. According to American and Colombian officials who briefed the Washington Post on their success, the campaign eliminated at least two dozen high-value rebel leaders, causing “mass desertions” and “chaos and dysfunction” within the organization. Such results would seem to validate the whole concept of high-value-people targeting and indeed are celebrated as such by JSOC and the CIA.

  But the reality was a little different. True to form, almost all the dead leaders were speedily replaced, often by younger, more able, or more brutal men. Mono Jojoy, for example, an aging senior leader who had risen through the ranks, was killed in September 2010; the Colombian president hailed his death as the “hardest blow” ever suffered by the rebel group. Yet he was almost immediately replaced by “El Médico,” Alberto Parra, an able younger leader who was an educated and astute doctor. Other high-level hits, except those in regions, such as the Caribbean coast, where FARC had already been shredded by government-sponsored paramilitary death squads, had produced the same result. Paul Reyes, a senior leader killed in a cross-border operation in 2008, was similarly replaced, in three days, by another experienced commander, a former university professor with the nom de guerre Joaquín Gómez. “You can see that their command and control stayed intact,” Adam Isacson, a specialist on the topic at the Washington Office on Latin America, pointed out to me. “They’ve had two ceasefires in recent years and made them stick; if command had broken down you’d have had groups going rogue and that didn’t happen.” In May 2014, in seeming rejection of long-standing U.S. policy, the Colombian government announced it had agreed in peace talks with FARC to work together in combating the cocaine trade, an initiative endorsed by the electorate with the re-election of President Santos the following month.