by Clint Watts
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Al-Qaeda first felt the American response to the September 11 terrorist attacks on October 7, 2001.10 Each guided missile that struck an al-Qaeda or Taliban target drove veteran mujahideen from their safe houses and scampering into the mountains. U.S. Special Forces soon arrived in droves. They teamed with the Northern Alliance and sprinted across the country in pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. Some terrorists were killed right away, and many others left so quickly that secrets tucked in al-Qaeda’s safe houses and stored on hard drives fell into the hands of advancing American commandos and intelligence officers.
Gregory Johnsen, a PhD scholar of the Middle East, accurately noted in his studies of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that bin Laden was like many other Arab volunteers to the Afghan mujahideen but for one exception: he had money.11 The son of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, founder of the Saudi Binladin Group and the wealthiest non-royal Saudi at the time of his death, Osama came from wealth no other jihadi could match.
Osama bin Laden briefly followed in the footsteps of his father, operating a construction company before traveling to Pakistan to join the mujahideen resistance to the Soviet Union. Bin Laden used his business acumen to form the Afghan Services Bureau (Maktab al-Khidamat) in Peshawar, Pakistan. His logistical skills proved more valuable than his time in combat. While he briefly fought in the Battle of Jaji, winning praise from the more hardened battlefield soldiers, his tracking of personnel and expenditures became the backbone on which he built a global front—the name al-Qaeda is Arabic for “the Base”—that would take jihadi activity to an entirely different level. Bin Laden’s vision, inspiration, money, logistical support, and organizational coordination brought him and top veterans from Afghanistan to command a global legion fighting in nearly every Islamic war in the world during the 1990s. When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, bin Laden commanded a global terror network operating on at least four continents and was responsible for the most devastating attack on U.S. soil since the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, nearly sixty years before.
Bin Laden’s mastery of planning and logistics offered a significant advantage over competing jihadi leaders and their nascent extremist groups during the 1990s. He and his deputies went to great pains to document and archive the actions of his group. Al-Qaeda tracked every expense and logged correspondence. This meticulous tracking served several purposes: it allowed bin Laden to efficiently run his organization, sustain operational control over a disparate network, and create a running historical archive for how his team sought to change the world. It’s unlikely that bin Laden ever appreciated the downside of keeping detailed notes on his activities.
It might be surprising to many that before the United States got wikileaked by WikiLeaks, the United States wikileaked on al-Qaeda a few months earlier, in February 2006. Bin Laden’s ledgers and communiqués lay in tatters or etched on hard drives confiscated during raids and battle damage assessments. Each successful strike provided not only the keys to where another al-Qaeda operative resided but a diagram to al-Qaeda’s internal workings, its strengths and vulnerabilities. The evidence traced how bin Laden’s team had bridged the transition from analog to digital. Charred handwritten notes dating back to the group’s founding, in the early 1990s, littered the scenes of targeted bombings. Computers, CD-ROMs, and floppy disks sat in safe houses, holding terrorist personnel records and employment contracts like those you’d find in any American corporate human resources department.
In the early days of the war on terror, U.S. counterterrorism focused on the immediate and the tactical. The pursuit of bin Laden, killing or capturing his deputies, and preventing the launch of another September 11–style attack were the obsessions of America’s wide-ranging manhunts. As American forces pushed al-Qaeda’s remnants in Afghanistan into Pakistan, Iran, and a smattering of Middle Eastern locales, the sheer volume of records recovered by U.S. forces stretched from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands and then millions of documents. Storing and archiving al-Qaeda’s secrets as thousands of American troops scoured the earth in pursuit of terrorists became a challenge—one requiring some method for centrally storing and recording what had been unearthed.
In 2002, CIA director George Tenet created the Harmony database, as the intelligence community’s central repository for all information gathered during counterterrorism operations. The database served as a single place for bringing together information for the conduct of the emerging field of intelligence known as DOMEX—document and media exploitation. Similar to the way al-Qaeda centralized documents for a sprawling terror network, the Harmony database centralized documents being recovered by a sprawling counterterror network. At first, the Harmony database assisted soldiers picking up clues about enemy whereabouts and communications from many different battlefields and helped support the prosecution of alleged terrorists.12
As documents populated the Harmony database, bin Laden’s trail went cold in Pakistan. His videotaped messages surfaced on Al Jazeera, a new franchise burst onto the scene in Iraq, and new internet forums were uniting a young generation of terrorist recruits. By 2005, the rapid fall of Afghanistan and the collapse of Saddam’s regime in Iraq had brought not the end of al-Qaeda but a new chapter. Rapid, rampant military pursuit of terrorists everywhere hadn’t rendered the group defunct. Instead, al-Qaeda surged back to life, invigorated by the violent rampages of Zarqawi and connected via chatrooms and internet forums. Raids on al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Iraq yielded the usual intelligence on the “next” target but didn’t provide much perspective on how to defeat the decentralized terrorist menace responsible for the September 11 attacks.
While most of the military focused narrowly on the raging battles in Central and Southwest Asia, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida, had received the broader mission of pursuing al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and its associates anywhere they might be, using any means available. Military planners at combatant commands frame their comprehensive strategic approaches to winning battles with the acronym DIME. Diplomacy, information, military, and economics represent the four strategic components for structuring well-rounded campaigns. Bombs, bullets, raids, and renditions didn’t muffle jihad’s call to kill Americans; more military muscle truly couldn’t be applied. Cutting off terrorist funding sources hadn’t made much of an impact, either, and economically al-Qaeda operated on a shoestring budget in most theaters. Diplomatic efforts had brought many partners into the U.S. coalition to counter terrorists, but al-Qaeda, as a non-state actor, didn’t have any counterpart for negotiation, and if even if it had, negotiation wasn’t an option for America.
The one aspect of national power where the U.S. military trailed al-Qaeda was information. Amid the United States’ renewed push toward public diplomacy at the national level, a smart officer at SOCOM understood the information war better than others. He gazed upon the Harmony database and saw in the millions of documents something different from those looking for tactical bread crumbs to track al-Qaeda’s movements. Instead, Major Steve saw al-Qaeda’s secrets from a different perspective. Strewn throughout their files and hard drives were the strategic deliberations of terrorists, their biases and preferences, expense reports, likes and dislikes, and successes and failures, as well as what they thought of one another. Al-Qaeda’s documents in sum yielded insights into the group’s strategic weaknesses and internal fractures. The military’s intelligence apparatus was great at tagging, tracking, and demolishing targets, but it was never meant to divine the historical, religious, and cultural trends, the strengths and weaknesses of al-Qaeda. Major Steve had an idea who could figure this out and, oddly, it was the same solution proposed by WikiLeaks: the “crowd.”
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, where I worked, offered an interface for the military and government to connect with top experts in the new cultures, regions, languages, and politics challenging effective counterterrorism o
perations. Major Steve recognized the opportunity the CTC could offer. At West Point, he could unlock the Harmony database’s secrets, create an open-source repository for the public, and enlist highly educated military officers stationed at West Point to study and collaborate with top professors positioned around the world. In 2005, the CTC launched the Harmony Program “to contextualize the inner-functioning of al-Qa’ida, its associated movement, and other security threats through primary source documents.” In addition to conducting initial research on the materials, the program aimed “to make these sources, which are captured in the course of operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other theaters, available to other scholars for further study.”13
The center’s faculty analyzed the first study and release of supporting documents, entitled Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities, on Valentine’s Day 2006. Cable television specials and endless news shows since September 11, 2001, had pushed the belief among Americans that al-Qaeda’s operations were menacingly flawless and that the organization operated at near perfection. But this first release of the group’s internal documents revealed it to be somewhat ordinary and remarkably similar in its administrative functions. Al-Qaeda’s employment contract appeared to be no different from that of an ordinary American worker. Theological debates and struggles with how to secretly control terrorist operatives shone through in most every document. These conversations offered opportunities for the United States to exploit al-Qaeda’s weaknesses.
The employment contract showed that Arab recruits were paid more than African recruits, and married volunteers with children received more benefits and vacation than single members. The report noted that ineffective terrorists, rather than be plucked off the battlefield, “should not be removed from the network if they can be reliably observed, even if they present easy targets.”14 The report’s justifications for this recommendation pulled from a 1999 email sent by Ayman al-Zawahiri to a Yemeni cell leader in which he scolded a subordinate, saying, “With all due respect, this is not an accounting. It’s a summary accounting. For example, you didn’t write any date, and many of the items are vague.”15 Nearly twenty years later, Zawahiri’s letter offers some insights into why terrorists in the ranks sought to defect to ISIS after bin Laden’s death: he was a stickler of a boss.
The release of the Harmony documents directly supported the report’s key recommendation: “increase internal dissension within the al-Qa’ida leadership.”16 Strewn throughout the documents was the organization’s dirty laundry. Communiqués between al-Qaeda subordinates challenged the direction put out by the group’s leaders and questioned whether orders should be obeyed. One member said that faulty leadership held the group back, asserting that bin Laden had rushed “to move without vision,” and asked Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to reject bin Laden’s orders.17
The CTC’s findings were some of the first to analyze al-Qaeda holistically and offer some alternatives to the previous five years of war. The insights published by West Point’s scholars were good, but more important were the audiences engaged by the released documents: the public “crowd” and the terrorists in al-Qaeda’s ranks. At the time of the Harmony and Disharmony report, there were more people studying terrorists than there were terrorists, and very little of this research pulled from internal documents or primary sources.
The release of the Harmony database into the wild had suddenly sparked new research efforts around the world. The original Arabic documents were included with English translations. A database at the Combating Terrorism Center’s website hosted the files, and hits on the servers showed how quickly word spread. Scholars with regional expertise, language skills, and in-depth knowledge of Arab cultures scoured the documents and returned deeper insights. Journalists used bin Laden’s and his team’s communiqués as the basis for investigating news stories. Everyone around the world seeking to end the terrorist group that had perpetrated the horrors of September 11 was suddenly more empowered. The “crowd” could help bring about the demise of al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda terrorists came to look at the Harmony documents as well. Those who’d survived America’s endless barrage now worried whether their private messages trash-talking top terror leaders would result in their purge from within. Among the Google Analytics for the Harmony Project were a growing list of pings from anonymous web users, people employing proxy servers to mask their online identity. The time zones for these pings suggested that they resided on the other side of the world. Al-Qaeda’s secrets were now working against them.
Harmony and Disharmony’s success led to two more Harmony database reports the next year. Al Qa’ida’s (Mis)Adventures in the Horn of Africa’s first report released a second tranche of documents focused on al-Qaeda’s early operations in East Africa, between 1992 and 1994, when the terror group tried and failed to infiltrate Somali clans. The remnants of this expedition later seeded the operational cells in the Horn of Africa that conducted the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.18 The second report’s primary findings were that al-Qaeda fared better not in failed states like Somalia, as conventional wisdom might suggest, but in weak states like Kenya and Pakistan, where weak national security operations restricted American counterterrorism efforts. Next came Cracks in the Foundation, which studied three periods of al-Qaeda’s history using the group’s internal documents.19 The study found that al-Qaeda, as a military organization, had never been particularly strong, and its success as a media organization masked deep internal divides between its leaders over strategic direction.20
The Harmony database armed crowds of researchers scattered around the world with more secrets for studying how to divide and conquer al-Qaeda’s terrorists. The Harmony documents surfaced in theses, dissertations, books, and government publications and even among terrorists. And then there was poor Sheikh Aweys. Only a few months after WikiLeaks’ December 2006 launch with the release of the Sheikh Aweys assassination order, an application form for a Kenyan visa surfaced among the al-Qaeda files released in the second Harmony report. The application read, “Hassan Dahir Haji Aweis . . . Date of Birth: 1944 . . . Country of Residence: Somalia . . . Reasons for Entry: Business.”21 The first guy outed by WikiLeaks, the veteran jihadi with whom Omar Hammami longed to connect on Twitter—his visa application from September 3, 1993, surfaced in a pile of al-Qaeda documents recovered in Afghanistan in 2002 showing his connections to the world’s most prolific terrorist group. Within a year, whether it was WikiLeaks or the Combating Terrorism Center, Sheikh Aweys had been outed by two transparency efforts that used two different methods to bring his secrets into the public.
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“Can you tell me a secret, or would you then have to kill me?” Americans love plays on this iconic phrase, born in books, that has migrated to endless television shows and movies about spies and espionage. Like, I imagine, most every government person who has ever held a security clearance, I’ve received this silly query thousands of times. My response, before I force a laugh to push away the question, is always the same one, which I never utter: “Yes, but if I told you a secret, would you even understand it?” Calls for transparency have risen proportionally as more information has moved to the internet. More secrets have spilled into the open in the past decade than anytime before. But do we understand more, or less, after all these disclosures?
Democracies and the citizens within them have always pursued the virtue of openness. But political scientists James R. Hollyer, B. Peter Rosendorff, and James Raymond Vreeland rightly point out in their study “Democracy and Transparency” that empirical analyses of the topic show “the policymaking of democratic governments is shaped by transparency and, importantly, democratic governments have incentives to obfuscate evidence.”22 Citizens want transparency, and elected officials want to keep their jobs.
WikiLeaks and the U.S. government both launched transparency initiatives in 2006, and while they mirror each other in concept, they�
�re distinctly different from each other in execution. In fact, they are diametrically opposed in terms of methods and declared intentions.
WikiLeaks doesn’t hack to gain secrets, but relies on others to provide them with secrets they can disclose. With the declared intention of fighting corruption and authoritarians, WikiLeaks matches and pulls from hackers and insiders whose personal grievances align with the group’s stated grievances. This is where WikiLeaks’ methods are oddly misaligned with the declared intentions of those who provide them with secrets. The couriers of WikiLeaks secrets, at least for their big public disclosures, arise not from the most corrupt, oppressive regimes in the world, but the most open, for the consequences of these data thefts in the former is death, and in the latter fame.
Two Americans, Chelsea Manning (the former Bradley Manning) and Edward Snowden, remain the most famous couriers connected to WikiLeaks. The former fed the outlet; the latter was assisted by it. Their disclosures surfaced in different places, but in spirit they sought the same goal: the transparency and accountability of the U.S. government. Both insiders were young at the time of their insider breaches, in their twenties. Both spent only a short time in their government roles before spilling the beans on their employer, the U.S. government.