The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  Aweys had been on an American list of top terror suspects for years, and the CIA had linked him to the al Qaeda cell in East Africa that had carried out the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. And yet he operated in plain sight, making high-profile trips to Dubai and moving openly among cities in Somalia. Under his command were a band of young, committed gunmen who had taken to calling themselves “al Shabaab”—Arabic for “The Youth.” The group would roam the streets of Mogadishu, hunting and killing anyone believed to have pledged allegiance to Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, a weak and corrupt organization created by the United Nations that had little control inside the country. Locals suspected of spying for the Americans were shot on sight.

  The CIA had not kept a permanent station inside Somalia for years, so the job of monitoring events inside the country fell to the clandestine officers in neighboring Kenya. The CIA station in Nairobi had grown significantly since the September 11 attacks, getting more money and personnel after CIA director Porter Goss decided that the agency needed to beef up its presence in Africa and reopen some of its previously shuttered stations on the continent. During the final months of 2005 and into 2006, alarming cables from spies in Nairobi arrived in Langley warning about the growing influence of the red-bearded Hassan Dahir Aweys and the al Shabaab gunmen. Some of the reports concluded that the young radicals inside the Islamic Courts Union, including a gangly veteran of the Afghanistan war named Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, could feather the nest for al Qaeda operatives to set up a new base in Somalia.

  But as much as Osama bin Laden and his followers might have wanted to establish a home in Somalia, the group over the years had confronted some of the same problems in the war-ravaged country that the Americans had. Put simply, al Qaeda didn’t understand Somalia, and a plan by the group to flee to Somalia once the war in Afghanistan had begun had failed miserably. Arab militants who arrived in the country had trouble navigating the dizzying array of clans and subclans knit into the fabric of Somali culture, and found themselves being extorted by clan elders at every turn. Rather than unite under a single banner to expel Westerners from the country, Somalis decided they would rather fight one another. Al Qaeda militants, adherents to the radical Wahhabi strain of Islam, could not relate to the more moderate Sufism that the vast majority of Somalis practice. Somalis had a reputation for being tremendous gossips, and the foreign visitors grew angry that they couldn’t keep secrets. All told, the chaotic African country by the sea seemed very different from the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

  This was hardly clear at the time to anyone in military or intelligence circles in Washington, and the alarming CIA reports out of Nairobi started getting attention at the White House. But what exactly was to be done if Somalia was going the way of Afghanistan? With the ghosts of the Black Hawk Down episode—the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu—still haunting the halls of the Pentagon, Army generals already had made it clear they might resign before the United States attempted another significant military intervention in Somalia. Besides, the wars elsewhere were sapping the ranks of soldiers and Marines, and the Pentagon could hardly spare troops for the Horn of Africa beyond what it had committed to the bare-bones task force in Djibouti, operating out of a former French Foreign Legion camp there. With the Bush administration convinced that Somalia was a problem that needed to be solved, the White House turned to the CIA to find a proxy army to fight a new war for Mogadishu. So was born the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism.

  The warlords of the ARPCT were hardly discreet about their ties to Washington and bragged openly about how much the CIA was paying them. But the tradecraft used by the Americans was also shoddy, making it readily apparent that the alliance was a CIA front. The gun shipments and money drops were broadcast in the local press. Agency officers supplied the warlords with contact information to use when they needed more supplies, and rumors spread through the capital that the CIA men had even given out an e-mail address to use when the warlords needed more guns and money.

  The clumsiness of the CIA had divided officials inside the American embassy in Nairobi, a fortress built after the 1998 bombing had destroyed the previous building. The entire operation was being run by the CIA’s station chief in Kenya, but diplomats at the compound began writing cables back to State Department headquarters warning about blowback from the covert support to the warlords. In one of the cables, Leslie Rowe, the embassy’s second-ranking officer, described the anger among African officials about the CIA effort. Michael Zorick, the State Department’s political officer for Somalia, sent a scathing cable to Washington criticizing the warlord policy and complaining that the CIA was running guns to some of the biggest thugs in Somalia. Soon afterward, Zorick was reassigned to Chad.

  Just as some of these officers had warned, the covert operation blew up in the CIA’s face. Instead of weakening the Islamists, it tipped the balance in Somalia in the other direction. Somalis began to embrace the Islamic Courts Union as the way to rid the country of foreign influence and finally bring an end to the warlord rule that had Balkanized the country. During a meeting of American ambassadors from East Africa and Yemen in May 2006, the American officials could already see things unraveling inside Mogadishu. With nobody able to agree about what the next steps should be, the ambassadors agreed on the importance of “changing the conversation” from the fighting in the Somali capital toward “positive U.S. steps” to help restore Somali institutions.

  What had once been a standoff turned into a rout, as the Islamists drove the CIA-backed warlords out of Mogadishu. The ICU consolidated its power in the capital. Even more disastrous for Washington, the Battle of Mogadishu gave even greater influence inside the ICU to Hassan Dahir Aweys and the radical band of al Shabaab gunmen.

  Hank Crumpton, the former spy at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, watched the disaster unfold from his desk at the State Department, where he had taken a job as the coordinator for counterterrorism. The job carried the lofty title of ambassador-at-large but was hobbled by its location inside an underfunded and occasionally dysfunctional diplomatic machinery. For Crumpton, the CIA’s warlord adventure in Somalia was a classic example of Washington turning to covert action when a problem seemed too difficult to solve in a different way. What do you do when you can’t figure out what to do in Somalia? “Here’s some money. Here’s some weapons. Now go,” he said.

  “Absent a foreign policy, covert action isn’t going to work,” he said. “And if you can describe to me the U.S. government’s foreign policy in Somalia in 2006, or even now, I will give you a ten-dollar bill.”

  The CIA’s station chief in Nairobi took the brunt of the withering internal criticism. Jose Rodriguez pulled the officer from Kenya, and the CIA decided it had had enough with Somalia for the time being. With the Islamic courts now in power in Mogadishu, Bush officials began speaking about Somalia as a new terror state. Jendayi Frazer, the State Department’s senior official for Africa policy, made public speeches during the last half of 2006 about direct connections between the ICU and al Qaeda and bluntly labeled the ICU “terrorists.”

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  THE COLLAPSE of the CIA effort in Somalia had, for the moment, exhausted the Bush administration’s options for dealing with the rise of the Islamists there. But where governments feared to tread, new opportunities were emerging for private military companies and would-be contractors eager to wade into the anarchy in East Africa.

  The conditions were perfect: The United States government was unwilling to send many of its own into Somalia, but it was eager to spend money so others could. By the middle of 2006, Somalia was turning into the outsourced war.

  Just a week after the CIA-backed warlords fled Mogadishu, a commercial jet carrying a middle-aged woman from the horse country of Northern Virginia landed in Nairobi. Michele Ballarin was the president of Select Armor, a small company with a contract to sell body armor to the Los Angeles Country Fire Department but one that had found no success wi
nning any big Pentagon deals. But her ambitions were far grander than being a fourth-tier defense contractor. When she landed in Kenya in June 2006, she was scheduled to have a private meeting with Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the man leading Somalia’s UN-backed government-in-exile from his luxurious hotel suite in Nairobi.

  It seemed a strange thing that a woman who had the appearance of a wealthy heiress would have an audience with the leader of Somalia’s feckless Transitional Federal Government. But Ballarin had traveled to the Horn of Africa several times before and had developed something of a cult following in some sectors of the Somali political class. She claimed to train and breed Lipizzaner stallions—the famous white horses that performed dressage—and wore her wealth wherever she went. She traveled with Louis Vuitton bags, expensive jewelry, and Gucci clothing. If the idea was to dazzle the residents of one of the world’s poorest countries, it had the intended effect. Somalis began referring to her by a one-word moniker, the Arabic word for “princess.” They called her “Amira.”

  It was a long way from West Virginia, where she had first made a name for herself during the 1980s as a Republican candidate in a staunchly Democratic state. She had tried to piggyback on Ronald Reagan’s popularity in the hopes of winning a congressional seat representing Morgantown, the location of West Virginia University. Just thirty-one at the time, she had funded much of her 1986 campaign with money from her first husband, a man several decades older than her who had landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day and amassed a small fortune as a real-estate developer. But she also hustled to raise money on the campaign trail by showing off her skills as a concert pianist during political fund-raisers. Trying to paint the Democratic incumbent as out of step with the values of West Virginian families, she criticized her opponent during the final weeks of the campaign for his vote to spend taxpayer money to print Playboy in Braille. She even made hay of his refusal to show up to one debate by cutting up a piece of cardboard, pasting his face on it, and debating him anyway. She was roundly defeated in the election.

  After the death of her first husband, she married Gino Ballarin, a former bartender at Manhattan’s 21 Club who went on to own and manage the private Georgetown Club, in Washington. The couple threw parties at their home in Virginia, eventually earning themselves a listing in The Green Book, a directory of “socially prominent Washingtonians” that was a bible for the city’s old-money elite. In 1997, she spoke to a reporter about how pleased she was to get into The Green Book with all her friends, neighbors, and other “supporters of equine sports.”

  “The book symbolizes old ways of doing things which have really rattled against change,” she said. “It symbolizes a gentler way of going about living.”

  The Ballarins by then were living on an estate in Markham, Virginia, with the grand name Wolf’s Crag. It was once the home of Turner Ashby, a Confederate cavalry commander who gained fame during Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign and earned the nickname “The Black Knight of the Confederacy.” But Michele Ballarin seemed to have bigger plans than living a genteel life of polo matches and lawn parties. During the 1990s and early 2000s she began a number of business ventures, from real-estate development to international finance to selling body armor.

  As she describes it, it was a casual meeting with a group of Somali Americans set up by a friend of hers from the Freemason lodge in Washington that sparked her interest in the war-racked country, and the transformation of Michele into Amira began. She started traveling to Africa, and soon the devoutly Christian woman who played the organ at her church each Sunday became entranced by the teachings of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam once dominant on the Indian subcontinent and North Africa. Sufism had lost ground after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire had spawned more muscular forms of Islam, but it is still practiced widely in Somalia. Ballarin became convinced that promoting Sufi groups inside the country was the best way to diminish what she saw as a toxic influence of strict Wahhabism that had gained a foothold in the Horn of Africa with the help of rich Saudi donors, who sent money there to build radical schools and mosques.

  Her public work in Somalia made her appear like just another rich do-gooder pushing airy-fairy development projects, but there was a darker, edgier side to her projects. When the Islamic Courts Union took control in Mogadishu, she saw an opportunity to take advantage of the vast ungoverned areas in Somalia to set up bases for a resistance movement to drive the Islamists out of power, as well as to nurture business ventures in the country. The horsewoman of Virginia would insert herself into the chaos.

  At the meeting with President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, Ballarin discussed her plan to set up a base in Somalia’s northern port city of Berbera. The city was home to an abandoned airstrip that NASA had once designated as an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle, and Ballarin figured that the site could be turned into a hub for commercial traffic and a location to train anti–al Shabaab forces. President Ahmed, a political figurehead seeking refuge inside a plush hotel in Nairobi, was hardly in a position to sign off on Ballarin’s plan. But when she emerged from the meeting, Ballarin was elated. Days later, she dashed off an e-mail to several of her business partners in the United States, including Chris Farina, the head of a Florida-based private security firm called ATS Worldwide.

  “Boys, successful meeting with President Abdullay Yussef [sic] and his chief of staff personnel,” Ballarin wrote. “He has appointed his chief of presidential protocol as our go to during this phase.” Later in the e-mail, Ballarin implied that the CIA was aware of her plans, and that she was planning to meet a CIA contact of hers in New York.

  But Farina urged caution, writing back to warn that the plan shouldn’t go off half-cocked. “A forced entry operation [into Mogadishu] at this point without the addition of follow-on forces who can capitalize on the momentum/initiative of the initial op will result in a replay of Dien Bien Phu,” he wrote, referring to the French debacle in Indochina in 1954.

  Farina also told Ballarin that perhaps the CIA wasn’t the best partner for their efforts—perhaps wise advice, given what had just happened in the country. A better bet, he said, was the Pentagon.

  She eventually took his advice, but it would be another two years before she managed to convince the Pentagon to fund her adventures inside Somalia.

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  THE ISLAMIC COURTS UNION’S takeover in Mogadishu at first brought a calm to the capital that it had not known for years. A city that warlords had divided up was now open. Children who had grown up within a mile of the sea but who had never actually seen the water, because it meant crossing into the zone of a rival warlord, were free to spend the day at the beach.

  But a series of pronouncements that summer by the al Shabaab wing of the Islamic Courts Union, which had in effect seized control of the ICU movement, turned many Somalis against the new leaders. Foreign films were banned, as were soccer games. Women were forced to veil their faces. Most unpopular of all was a ban on khat, the narcotic green leaf that almost all Somali men chewed daily to bring on a mild, pleasant haze.

  The concerns in Washington about the imposition of sharia law in Mogadishu were stoked by a stream of intelligence fed to the Bush administration by Ethiopian officials, who feared that a new al Qaeda safe haven might be emerging on their eastern border. Animosities between Ethiopians and Somalis ran deep. During the 1970s the two countries fought a territorial battle over the Ogaden region of Ethiopia that became a proxy conflict of the Cold War—with the United States supporting Somalia and the Soviet Union giving military supplies to the Ethiopians. But the fall of the Soviet Union reshuffled the alliances in Africa, as it did in so many other parts of the world. During the 1990s, with Washington worrying about the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, Ethiopia and its Christian majority came to be seen as natural allies for the United States.

  So, during the summer of 2006, when Ethiopian officials began to talk openly about the possibility of invading Somalia to dismantle the Islamic Courts Union an
d al Shabaab, some in Washington saw an opportunity. The strategy to arm a ragtag collection of warlords had failed, but maybe the Ethiopian army could become America’s new proxy force in Somalia. Within weeks of the Islamist takeover in Mogadishu, General John Abizaid, of U.S. Central Command, visited Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, during a tour of East Africa. During meetings with military, CIA, and State Department officials at the American embassy, he asked about what Ethiopia’s military might need if they were going to drive their tanks toward Mogadishu.

  Abizaid made it clear that, while the United States would not push Ethiopia to invade, it would try to ensure that an invasion was a success. He also met with Ethiopian officials and offered to share American intelligence about ICU military positions inside Somalia. Back in Washington, Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte authorized spy satellites to be trained on Somalia to provide detailed pictures for the Ethiopian troops. “The idea,” as one American official stationed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2006 described it, “was to get the Ethiopians to fight our war.”

  The Ethiopian invasion would also provide cover for American commando missions into Somalia, launched from a base in the coffee-growing region of eastern Ethiopia. During the summer and fall of 2006, when it increasingly looked like Ethiopian troops might invade Somalia, Navy Seabees arrived at the base in Dire Dawa, three hundred miles east of Addis Ababa. Officially, the Seabees were there on a humanitarian mission: Treacherous rains had flooded the plains around Dire Dawa and sent a ten-foot wall of water crashing through the town, and the Seabees helped set up tents and give emergency medical care for the ten thousand people displaced by the floods.