The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  During Keller’s time in South Waziristan, the CIA’s primary target was an Egyptian chemist with the nom de guerre Abu Khabab al-Masri. A member of bin Laden’s inner circle, al-Masri once ran al Qaeda’s Derunta training camp, in Afghanistan, where the group had experimented with chemical weapons and other poisons. He was thought to be hiding in South Waziristan, and the United States had put a $5 million bounty on his head. But the CIA knew almost nothing about what he looked like; in early 2006 American officials admitted they had mistakenly been using the wrong photograph on a wanted poster for al-Masri. The picture on the poster was replaced with a black silhouette.

  With so little to go on, the CIA officers in South Waziristan often had to lean heavily on unsubstantiated information from sources that had not been vetted. One of the tips Keller received was that al-Masri would occasionally visit a particular shop in the Wana bazaar. Keller asked his Pakistani agent to hire a subagent who lived in the vicinity and would have reason to visit the shop. An operation was set up to stake out the shop, determine if al-Masri was indeed a regular, and to take a picture of him. Then the plan was to install surveillance equipment to determine whom al-Masri might be trying to contact.

  Keller never learned if the operation ultimately bore fruit, or if it was just one part of a wider operation to net al-Masri. Officers at individual bases were usually kept in the dark about operations in towns even as close as a dozen miles away, where there were other CIA bases, and he didn’t have access to classified cable traffic in the rest of the country. Keller’s was a worm’s-eye view, and he dutifully sent his intelligence reports forward for the analysts at Islamabad to use as one piece of a mosaic.

  It was a setup ripe for circular reporting. Once, a sub-source of Keller’s passed along a tip that Osama bin Laden had been spotted in the Dir Valley, in the North-West Frontier Province. Keller tapped out a cable to Islamabad, suggesting that the CIA send an agent to Dir to investigate the tip.

  When he received the cable, the Islamabad station chief was irate; bin Laden tips were like Elvis sightings, igniting interest all the way back to Langley. CIA officers in Pakistan were pushed to investigate even the murkiest rumor about bin Laden, and the Dir Valley tip had been checked out—and debunked—months earlier. Islamabad Station was now required to explain to excited CIA leaders why Keller’s cable should be ignored. The CIA station chief flew out to Wana personally to chew Keller out, figuring it was worth the bumpy helicopter ride.

  “This was a rumor that they had worked long and hard to drive a stake through,” Keller recalled. “And, like a vampire, I had resurrected it.”

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  UNBEKNOWNST TO KELLER, he was just one part of a large campaign by the CIA in 2006 to refocus the hunt for Osama bin Laden by dramatically expanding the number of case officers in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was painfully evident to senior officers at Langley that the Iraq war had taken attention away from the al Qaeda manhunt, but the bin Laden hunt had also been beset by problems within the CIA. Clandestine officers posted in Islamabad had been clashing with officers from the Counterterrorism Center at Langley, whose preference for Predator strikes was derided by officers at Islamabad Station as the work of “boys with toys.”* The CIA station chief in Islamabad thought the drone strikes in 2005 and 2006—which, while infrequent at that time, were often based on bad intelligence and had resulted in many civilian casualties—had done little except fuel hatred for the United States inside Pakistan and put Pakistani officials in the uncomfortable position of having to lie about the strikes.

  There had also been dysfunction back at headquarters. The battles between members of the Directorate of Operations—which oversaw the spies in the field—and Porter Goss’s aides spilled into the public through media leaks, and the Directorate of Operations was also in turf fights with other branches of the agency. In late 2005, Porter Goss called a management retreat for all the agency’s senior leaders, a move designed to soothe tensions among his leadership team. During the meeting, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence—the head of the analysts in charge of piecing together reports from the field—complained openly about the arrogance of the clandestine officers, who he said could get away with whatever they wanted. Jose Rodriguez, the head of operations, exploded. “Wake up and smell the fucking coffee!” Rodriguez shouted, reminding everyone in the room that unlike the analysts, who saw the world from their desks, his undercover officers worked at “the pointy end of the spear.”

  Rodriguez’s volatility occasionally created problems within the clandestine branch itself, and by early 2006 he was barely speaking with the man he had installed as chief of the Counterterrorism Center, Robert Grenier. Grenier, a former station chief in Islamabad, was polished and cerebral—in many ways the antithesis of Rodriguez. He had pushed to expand the CIA’s counterterrorism aperture beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, ordering more officers to focus on emerging threats in places like Southeast Asia and North Africa. Given the Counterterrorism Center’s expansion since 2001, Grenier thought it needed to be restructured to eliminate redundancies. The CIA’s bin Laden–hunting unit, formed in the 1990s and code-named Alec Station, was reorganized and renamed.

  Rodriguez thought all of this was a distraction from the bin Laden hunt. He replaced Grenier with another officer from inside the CTC, a gaunt, chain-smoking workaholic named Mike.* Mike had spent his early career as an undercover officer in Africa and had converted to Islam. His wardrobe tended toward shades of black and gray, as did his general demeanor. Some called him the “Prince of Darkness,” and he would eventually preside over the CIA’s most expansive killing operation since the Vietnam War.

  When Mike took over the job, in 2006, his immediate mission was to carry out a plan to bolster the CIA’s ranks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, eliminate the squabbling between the stations in Kabul and Islamabad, and reorganize the staff at CIA headquarters. Outside the main cafeteria at Langley, just past the Starbucks, giant structures resembling Quonset huts were built to house the growing staff devoted to the bin Laden hunt. As part of this new plan, dubbed Operation Cannonball, dozens of intelligence analysts were sent to Kabul and Islamabad to work in tandem with the case officers chasing slivers of leads on the whereabouts of al Qaeda leaders.

  Most important, however, the CIA sent more undercover officers into the field—one of them Art Keller—to try to develop sources independent of the Pakistanis. With the United States fighting a public war in Afghanistan, it was easy enough to get more CIA officers into Kabul. The bigger problem was Pakistan, where the ISI closely monitored the number of visa applications for American officials hoping to enter the country and kept a close watch on the CIA officers sent to man the Islamabad station. Langley needed to come up with more exotic ways to mask the identities of the spies it wanted to get into Pakistan.

  One opportunity came on the morning of October 8, 2005, when a massive earthquake in the mountains of Kashmir leveled the city of Muzaffarabad and caused landslides throughout northern Pakistan. Initial Pakistani government estimates put the death toll at nearly ninety thousand people, nineteen thousand of them children who died when schoolhouses collapsed on top of them. Billions of dollars of international aid poured into Pakistani Kashmir, and almost immediately a stream of American military helicopters crossed the border from Afghanistan to deliver humanitarian aid. The Chinook helicopters became a regular sight in Kashmir, and Pakistanis began referring to them in the local dialect as “angels of mercy.”

  But the Americans were not just on a mercy mission. In the months after the earthquake, the CIA used the relief effort in Kashmir to slip covert officers into the country without the ISI’s knowledge. The American spies adopted covers of various civilian professions. ISI officials suspected that the aid mission might be a Trojan horse to get more CIA officers into Pakistan, but amid the devastation in Kashmir and the urgent need to maintain the stream of humanitarian relief, Pakistani military and intelligence officers were not in a position to challenge the
credentials of all the Americans arriving in Pakistan.

  It would be several years before the CIA would begin to reap the benefits of its enlarged presence inside Pakistan, which in any event was still relatively modest. One former top official at Langley estimates that the total number of undercover officers inside Pakistan grew by only about 10 to 20 percent during Operation Cannonball. CIA officials at that time worried that flooding the country with too many spies would encourage more surveillance by the ISI.

  But the CIA had trouble masking a weakness. There were a finite number of seasoned officers to send to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and managers at Langley became so desperate for bodies that they took some newly minted case officers—recent graduates from “The Farm” at Camp Peary—and sent them to the field. “We had to put people out in the field who had less-than-ideal levels of experience,” recalled one of those in charge of the operation, “but there wasn’t much to choose from.”

  One aspect of the retooled hunt for Osama bin Laden was to try to penetrate the network of couriers that bin Laden used to transmit messages to his followers. The CIA had been gathering snippets of information about bin Laden’s favored couriers, which had enabled the CIA to begin tracking al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan to develop a richer picture about the internal workings of the terror group’s second and third tiers. When General Michael Hayden took over the CIA from Porter Goss, in the spring of 2006, the agency “had developed far more penetrations, far more knowledge of al Qaeda in 2006 than we ever had in 2001 or 2002,” Hayden said. “We actually began to develop good sources of information.”

  It was shortly after a visit by Hayden to Pakistan in August 2006 that the CIA and ISI set up a joint operation to arrest Rashid Rauf, the kingpin of a terror plot to blow up a handful of jets crossing the Atlantic from London, using a lethal mixture of powdered chemicals and the breakfast drink Tang. Rauf had orchestrated the plot from the tribal regions, communicating with teams inside the United Kingdom who would carry out the mission. The plot had been in the works for years, and the plotters had become sloppy. Britain’s MI5 had managed to set up surveillance nets to monitor the groups, and British spies used wiretaps to listen patiently as the plot unfolded.

  When the ISI picked up information that the planners were about to carry out the attack, Pakistan’s spymaster, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, told Jose Rodriguez that they were prepared to pick up Rauf as he rode in a bus from the tribal areas to the city of Bahawalpur, in Punjab. Rodriguez, who was visiting Islamabad at the time, ordered CIA officers to set up a surveillance post near Bahawalpur, where they could listen to Rauf’s cell-phone communications and feed information to Pakistani troops, who made an uneventful arrest.

  MI5 was furious, knowing that Rauf’s arrest would alarm the plotters in Britain. British spies neither trusted nor relied on the ISI, an animosity that had seeds in the days of British rule in India before the partition with Pakistan, and the British suspected there was some ulterior motive in General Kayani’s move to arrest Rauf. British police scrambled to roll up the twenty-five plotters before they scattered and wondered about the costs of having to make the arrests before they could gather more evidence to indict the suspects.

  Still, foiling the August 2006 plot was a significant success, even though it got the CIA no closer to finding bin Laden. Going after the courier network was what Hayden described as a “bank shot” for finding bin Laden and often felt like chasing shadows—a mission bedeviled by misinformation and insufficient manpower.

  For instance, in the years before Pakistani agents for the CIA tracked Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti to a sprawling compound in the leafy town of Abbottabad, where bin Laden turned out to be hiding, CIA interrogators had been led to believe that al-Kuwaiti was of marginal value. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the September 11 attacks, had told his interrogators that al-Kuwaiti had retired. But there was also a good deal of suspicion about what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said, because he was one of the CIA detainees who had been subjected to the most extreme interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. When he was telling the truth and when he was merely telling interrogators what they wanted to hear was a matter of fierce debate inside the American government. One year later, a different detainee assured his interrogators that al-Kuwaiti was indeed bin Laden’s main courier, information that the CIA was eventually able to corroborate elsewhere.

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  EVEN WITH THE INCREASE in the CIA’s ranks in Pakistan, the agency hardly had the resources in the country to chase every lead, and ISI restrictions on surveillance used by the Americans made things even more difficult. During his time in South Waziristan, Art Keller began building a dossier on a suspected al Qaeda facilitator, nicknamed Haji Omar, who owned four compounds in the area that al Qaeda militants were said to frequent. Keller sent a cable to his bosses in Islamabad requesting aerial surveillance to monitor the comings and goings at Haji Omar’s compounds. He didn’t have nearly enough human sources to keep close watch on the compound, and human surveillance was always riskier.

  The gist of the cable was, according to Keller, “This guy is involved in al Qaeda logistics, is definitely a courier, and maybe this is our guy. How else are we going to find out until we start watching him?” But with the South Waziristan peace deal in place, the ISI refused to allow Predator flights.

  The dynamics in South Waziristan were giving Keller a glimpse of the byzantine apparatus of the ISI, where wheels turning clockwise have no contact with wheels going in the other direction. Operatives inside the ISI’s Directorate C, the division of the spy agency responsible for counterterrorism operations, often helped CIA officers hunt al Qaeda operatives. Asad Munir, the ISI’s former station chief in Peshawar, had been an officer from Directorate C. But these officers were sometimes at odds with the Pakistani spies of Directorate S, which had long been responsible for nurturing groups like the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Pakistan has seen as critical proxies for its defense against India. It was Directorate S that helped arm the mujahedeen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, helped navigate the Taliban’s rise to power during the 1990s, and in the years since 2001 has worked to see that various militant groups keep the focus of their violence inside Afghanistan, rather than turning their fury against Pakistan.

  Almost nothing is written publicly about Directorate S, and even though the CIA worked with Directorate S operatives during the Soviet war, American spies have only an impressionistic portrait of its operations. Some inside the CIA have spent years obsessively gathering nuggets of information about Directorate S, and what American analysts generally agree on is that, since 2001, Directorate S has been at the vanguard of the ISI’s quiet strategy to maintain ties with militant groups that could serve Pakistan’s interests in the future.

  Whether Directorate S routinely ordered lethal attacks against American and NATO troops in Afghanistan is still a matter of some debate, but the American electronic-surveillance net over Pakistan—and, more specifically, ISI headquarters—frequently intercepted phone calls between Pakistani spies and Haqqani Network operatives. Pakistani officials usually either deny the evidence or say it is the work of rogue elements in the spy service, but in private have made a case that the spy agency needed to work with groups like the Haqqani Network to protect Pakistan’s western flank. American spy agencies even intercepted one telephone call in 2008 during which General Kayani referred to the Haqqani Network as a “strategic asset.” While “so many people inside the CIA say, ‘The ISI is dirty,’ and others say, ‘The ISI can help us,’” said Keller. “It’s actually both at the same time, and that’s the problem.”

  Compared with South Waziristan, the dynamic between American and Pakistani spies during the summer of 2006 was only marginally different in North Waziristan, where the government had not yet signed a peace deal with militants. The CIA and ISI worked more closely together, and shared a base in an abandoned schoolhouse in Miranshah, less than a mile from the Haqqani Netw
ork’s primary madrassa in the town. From there, American and Pakistani spies gathered intelligence to find another senior al Qaeda figure, Khalid Habib.

  As the hunt for Habib gained momentum, the CIA reassigned Keller to North Waziristan. Even with the move, he remained in charge of the operations in South Waziristan and continued to run his sources via computer messages. He had been doing the same thing while stuck inside the base at Wana, so it mattered little if he was, in effect, telecommuting. Keller and other CIA officers directed Predators to monitor truck convoys and mud compounds outside of Miranshah in the hope of getting enough information to call in a strike on Khalid Habib. The ISI collected its own intelligence from human sources, which was combined with the information from the Predators and electronic eavesdropping.

  But the cooperation had its limits. When Keller arrived at Miranshah, he was given a piece of advice from the base chief.

  “Don’t tell anything to Pakistani army intelligence you don’t want to get back to the Taliban,” he said.

  Pakistani army intelligence, a unit distinct from the ISI, was thought to have even deeper ties to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network than the ISI’s Directorate S. Weeks before Keller had arrived in Miranshah, the ISI and CIA had raided the Haqqani madrassa but had come up with nothing. CIA officers later learned from sources that Pakistani spies had warned Haqqani militants that the raid was about to take place.

  Though frustrated, Keller understood perfectly why Pakistan was so wary of dismantling the Haqqani Network. The United States was not going to be in Afghanistan forever, and turning the Haqqanis into enemies might lead to two possible outcomes for Islamabad, both horrible. The best case would be that Pakistani troops would find themselves bogged down in an endless war in the mountains against a group that could be a far more useful ally in the effort to blunt Indian influence in Afghanistan. The worst case was that the war could spread east, with the Haqqanis carrying out violence in Pakistan’s settled territories.