The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  Dearlove had grown up in the classic British spying tradition. He graduated from Queens’ College at the University of Cambridge, a traditional recruiting ground for the British secret services, and had served in foreign postings in Africa, Europe, and Washington. Like his predecessors, as the head of MI6 he signed all internal memos with his code name, “C”—by tradition, always in green ink.

  Shortly after his plane, carrying the call sign ASCOT-1, landed in Washington, Dearlove found himself inside the Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters. On a large screen, CIA officers were watching video of a white Mitsubishi truck driving along a road in Afghanistan. Dearlove had known that the United States had developed the ability to wage war by remote control, but he had never before watched the Predator drone in action.

  Several minutes went by as the Mitsubishi was framed by the crosshairs at the center of the video monitor, until a missile blast washed the entire screen in white. Seconds later, the picture clarified to show the wreckage of the truck, twisted and burning.

  Dearlove turned to a group of CIA officers, including Ross Newland, an agency veteran who months earlier had taken a job as part of a group overseeing the Predator program. He cracked a wry smile.

  “It almost isn’t sporting, is it?”

  1: PERMISSION TO KILL

  “You are there to kill terrorists, not make enemies.”

  —Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, September 14, 2001

  The lights in the White House Situation Room dimmed, and the CIA men began the slide show.

  The pictures had been taken in haste and were grainy and out of focus. Some were of men getting into a car, or walking down the street. The scene in the darkened room resembled a mafia movie, where FBI officers sip coffee and scroll through photographs of mob kingpins. In this case, however, the images were of men who the Central Intelligence Agency was proposing to kill.

  Gathered around the table were all the vice president’s men, including legal adviser David Addington and chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, an old Washington hand known as “Scooter.” At the head of the table, Vice President Dick Cheney watched the rogues gallery of slides with intense interest. It was a cold, late-fall day in 2001, just weeks after President George W. Bush had signed a secret order giving the CIA power it had lost in the 1970s, after a series of grisly and sometimes comic revelations about CIA assassination attempts had led the White House to ban the spy agency from exterminating America’s enemies. On that day in the Situation Room, the CIA was reporting back to the White House on how it intended to use its newly acquired license to kill.

  The two CIA officers leading the presentation, Jose Rodriguez and Enrique Prado, told the group that the Counterterrorist Center was recruiting CIA officers for a highly classified new program: a project to insert small teams of assassins into other countries to hunt down and kill the people that the Bush administration had marked for death. Among the photographs was one of Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian who the CIA believed had helped organize the September 11 attacks and was living in the open in Germany. There was also a picture of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a hero in Pakistan for his work developing its atomic bomb but a villain in the West for secretly transferring nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and other pariah states. By shooting each photograph at close range, the CIA was making an eerie, unmistakable point: We can get close enough to take their pictures, so we can get close enough to kill.

  But behind the bravado were unanswered questions. How would CIA hit squads slip unnoticed into Germany, Pakistan, and other countries? Could a group of American assassins really set up a net of surveillance and then, at the appointed time, manage to put a bullet into the head of their target? The agency had figured out none of the logistics, but Rodriguez and Prado had not come to the White House prepared to answer detailed questions about the operations. They were just looking for permission.

  Cheney told them to get to work.

  —

  PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, the son of a former director of central intelligence* for whom the agency had renamed its headquarters in Langley, inherited a shrunken and dispirited spy service, a shade of what it had been during the Cold War. But in the final months of 2001, Bush had put the CIA in charge of a global manhunt, and its performance had buffed up the agency’s image of itself as nimble and responsive to the demands of the commander-in-chief—the antithesis of the lumbering, bureaucratic Pentagon.

  The CIA was now running a secret war at the direction of the White House, and the agency’s once ignored Counterterrorist Center had become the war’s frantic command post. The center had once been a backwater within the CIA, viewed by many at Langley as a collection of odd zealots who had ended up there after failing at more prestigious assignments. But after the September 11 attacks the Counterterrorist Center began the most dramatic expansion in its history, and over the course of a decade it would become the CIA’s beating heart.

  Hundreds of clandestine officers and analysts were taken off the Asia and Russia desks and reassigned to the maze of hastily built cubicles jammed inside the CTC’s operations hub. The layout became so complex that people had difficulty finding their colleagues. Cardboard street signs were erected to help find cubicles located along “Usama Bin Lane” and “Zawahiri Way.” A sign was eventually posted above the center’s door—a constant, oppressive reminder that another terror attack could be days, or even minutes, away. The sign read, TODAY IS SEPTEMBER 12, 2001.

  Directing the whirlwind in the war’s early months was J. Cofer Black, a flamboyant officer who had been obsessed with hunting Osama bin Laden ever since he ran the CIA’s station in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, when bin Laden was living in exile in the country. Black had cultivated an image inside the CIA as something of a cross between a mad scientist and General George Patton. On September 11, when some feared that the final hijacked airplane might be headed toward Langley, Black refused to allow CTC officers to evacuate CIA headquarters along with the rest of agency personnel.

  In the months that followed, CIA director George Tenet rarely went to the White House without Black at his side, and a mythology developed about Black’s determination to kill off as many al Qaeda operatives as possible. During an Oval Office meeting two days after the attacks, Bush asked Black whether the CIA was up to handling its new assignment, which involved inserting paramilitary teams into Afghanistan to ally themselves with Afghan warlords and fight the Taliban. In ghoulish hyperbole, Black claimed that by the time the CIA was done with al Qaeda, bin Laden and his brethren would “have flies walking across their eyeballs.” That was the kind of talk Bush wanted to hear, and he took an immediate liking to the bombastic counterterrorism chief. But some of the president’s war cabinet cringed at the macho talk and began referring to Black as “the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.”

  Black’s exalted status with those who counted in the White House led to friction inside the CIA and constant battles with his boss, James Pavitt, whom he considered weak and unimaginative. Pavitt headed the Directorate of Operations, the branch of the agency responsible for all foreign espionage and covert action missions, and thought Black was a showboat and a cowboy. He believed that Black was far too eager to get the CIA involved in the kind of overseas exploits that had been a constant source of trouble for the agency, and in the years before the 9/11 attacks they had fought bitterly over whether the CIA should embrace the armed Predator to hunt and kill bin Laden in Afghanistan.

  But the success of the CIA’s initial strategy in Afghanistan in late 2001 was a victory for Black and the Counterterrorist Center, and it seemed to prove to the CIA’s detractors that there were virtues to a small cadre of officers at the CIA running a campaign against a diffuse organization like al Qaeda. Teams of CIA paramilitary officers, later joined by Army Green Berets, had turned a ragged collection of Afghan militias into a conquering army. Riding on horses and in rusted Soviet-era armored vehicles, the Afghans had driven the Taliban from Kabul and Ka
ndahar.

  The strange new conflict had also upended how the United States waged war. The traditional wartime chain of command—passing from the White House to the secretary of defense to a four-star commander with a staff of hundreds to build and execute a war plan—had quietly been circumvented. The CIA director was now a military commander running a clandestine, global war with a skeleton staff and very little oversight. Tenet began pushing aggressively to bulk up the CIA’s paramilitary teams in Afghanistan, and he sold the White House on a program to capture terrorists, hide them in secret jails, and subject them to an Orwellian regimen of brutal interrogation methods. Only Bush, Cheney, and a small group at the White House were overseeing decisions about who should be captured, who should be killed, and who should be spared.

  This was an abrupt change for Tenet, who in the years before the September 11 attacks had liked to tell his bosses at the White House that CIA officers should stay removed from the process of making policy. He evoked an almost monastic image of the spies at Langley producing intelligence assessments, while those “across the river,” at the White House and in Congress, made decisions based on these assessments. James Pavitt would later tell investigators from the 9/11 Commission that one lesson from the Iran–Contra scandal of the 1980s was that “we don’t do policy from [Langley] . . . and you don’t want us to.”

  If that idea had already been something of a useful myth, certainly by late 2001 the CIA could no longer claim that it stood apart from messy decisions about war and peace. Bush demanded that Tenet come to the Oval Office each day for the president’s daily brief—it was the first time since the agency’s founding that the CIA director, rather than a lower-level analyst, provided the regular morning briefing at the White House. Like his CIA predecessors, Tenet was eager for the access to the president, and every morning he and Cofer Black arrived at the White House with the catalogue of terrorist plots and plotters to tell a rapt audience about the steps that the CIA was taking to protect the country. The daily audiences with the president made Tenet and the CIA indispensable to the White House, which had an insatiable appetite for information about any threats.

  But such high-level attention was also beginning to have a distorting effect on the analysis that the CIA was producing—making it narrower, more tactical. Hundreds of CIA analysts were now working on terrorism, which was understandable in the aftermath of an attack that killed nearly three thousand Americans. But it became immediately obvious to the analysts that the path to career advancement at the CIA was to start working on terrorism, with the goal of producing something that might be read to the president early one morning inside the Oval Office. And what the White House was most interested in were leads about the whereabouts of specific al Qaeda operators, not broader subjects like the level of support al Qaeda had in the Muslim world or the impact that American military and intelligence operations might have on radicalizing a new generation of militants. The CIA focused its efforts accordingly.

  Even the language of spycraft was gradually changing. CIA case officers and analysts had once used the term “targeting” as they made decisions about which foreign government official should be targeted for information or which foreign national could be turned into a CIA informant. Eventually, “targeting” came to mean something quite different for the analysts who moved into the Counterterrorist Center. It meant tracking down someone deemed a threat to the United States, and capturing or killing him.

  The fights between Cofer Black and James Pavitt intensified, and by early 2002 Black had decided to leave the clandestine service and take a job at the State Department. His replacement was Jose Rodriguez, who had been one of the Counterterrorist Center’s top officers and the humble counterpoint to Black. Cofer Black had Middle East experience and was one of a handful of CIA officers with intimate knowledge about the terror network led by Osama bin Laden; Rodriguez had never served in the Muslim world and spoke no Arabic. But he was close to Pavitt, and some clandestine officers suspected that Rodriguez initially had been installed at the center so that Pavitt could keep tabs on Black. A native of Puerto Rico and the son of two teachers, Rodriguez had joined the intelligence agency in the midseventies after graduating from the University of Florida’s law school. His undercover career had been spent mostly inside the Latin America division, the home of the CIA’s adventures in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras during the 1980s. But at that time Rodriguez was still junior enough to avoid being enmeshed in the Iran–Contra investigations that would cripple the division for years. Rodriguez was well liked inside the clandestine service but had never distinguished himself as one of the best case officers in his CIA peer group. He served in a number of CIA stations in Latin America, including Bolivia and Mexico, and fostered an image as a maverick who liked to stick it to bureaucrats at Langley who he thought were micromanaging field operations. He was an avid horseback rider, and while he was station chief in Mexico City he named his favorite horse Business, instructing subordinates that if one of the bosses at Langley called to inquire about his whereabouts they should be told that Rodriguez was “out on Business.”

  When he took over the Latin America division, in 1995, it was once again in turmoil. John Deutch, President Clinton’s second CIA director, had just fired a number of case officers for what the CIA euphemistically calls “close and continuing contacts with foreign nationals.” In other words, the men down in Latin America were having illicit affairs, and there were concerns that their promiscuity could make them vulnerable to blackmail. Rodriguez soon found trouble of his own. When a childhood friend was arrested in the Dominican Republic on a drug charge, Rodriguez intervened to stop Dominican police from beating his friend while in prison. It was a clear conflict of interest for the head of the CIA’s Latin America division to intervene with a foreign government on behalf of a friend, and the spy agency’s inspector general reprimanded Rodriguez for showing “a remarkable lack of judgment.” He was removed from the job.

  But by 2001 his career had rebounded, and Rodriguez found himself among a number of Latin American hands—including his friend Enrique Prado—helping to run the CIA’s new war. He became a regular at the daily 5 P.M. meetings around Tenet’s conference table, where senior CIA officials received daily battlefield updates about operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It was during one of those sessions that Rodriguez made an offhand suggestion that would lead to one of the most fateful decisions of the Bush administration.

  The question before the group was what to do with all the Taliban fighters that American troops and CIA officers were picking up in Afghanistan. Where could they be held over the long term? The meeting turned into a brainstorming session, with various CIA officers suggesting countries that might be willing to accept the detainees. One officer suggested the Ushuaia prison, on Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego, a desolate facility at the bottom of the world. Another suggested the Corn Islands, two tiny specks in the Caribbean Sea off the Nicaraguan coast. But all of these suggestions were dismissed as unrealistic options. Finally, Rodriguez offered up an idea, almost in jest.

  “Well, we could put them at Guantánamo Bay,” he said.

  Everyone around the table laughed, thinking about how much it would anger Fidel Castro if the United States were to jail the prisoners of its new war on the American military base in Cuba. But the more they thought about the prospect, the more everyone thought Guantánamo actually made sense. It was an American facility, and the fate of the prison would not be jeopardized there as it could be in another country if the government changed leadership and decided to kick the United States’ prisoners out. And, the CIA officials figured, a prison at Guantánamo Bay would be outside the jurisdiction of American courts. A perfect location, it seemed.

  Cuba became the CIA’s top recommendation for the new American prison, and soon enough the agency would build its own secret jail in one corner of the Guantánamo Bay prison complex. A maximum-security facility, it was dubbed Strawberry Fields by CIA officers because
the prisoners presumably would be there, as the Beatles sang, “forever.”

  —

  ON A CHAOTIC BATTLEFIELD seven thousand miles away from Washington, the first war of the twenty-first century was turning out to be a far messier affair than it had first appeared inside the warren of cubicles at the CIA or in tidy PowerPoint presentations delivered in wood-paneled offices on the top floors of the Pentagon. By early 2002, Afghanistan was neither a daily shooting war nor a hopeful peace but a twilight conflict beset by competition and mistrust between soldiers and spies. American missions were often based on shards of intelligence from unreliable sources, as when dozens of Navy SEALs and Marines spent eight days digging up graves at a cave complex at Zhawar Kili, in eastern Afghanistan, based on intelligence that Osama bin Laden might have been killed in a recent airstrike on the base. They were hoping to exhume bin Laden’s body and provide a reason to end the Afghan war after just three months. They dug up a handful of bodies but didn’t find what they were looking for.

  Sometimes, poor communication between the CIA and the military had deadly results. On January 23, a team of Army Green Berets launched a raid in the dark of night on two compounds at Hazar Qadam, a hundred miles northeast of Kandahar. The compounds consisted of several buildings perched on the side of a hill. As an AC-130 gunship circled overhead, two teams stormed the compounds simultaneously.

  Staccato bursts of AK-47 gunfire erupted from the buildings as the teams blew a hole in the outer walls. The Americans returned fire and began moving from room to room as some fought hand to hand with the suspected Taliban gunmen. By mission’s end, the Americans had killed more than forty people inside the compounds, and the AC-130 had reduced the structures to rubble.