All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  By 2000, Al Qaeda remained an organization of the educated. The core leadership consisted of many former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the Egyptian intellectual and physician Ayman al-Zawahiri. The principal planner of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, received a degree in mechanical engineering from North Carolina A&T State University in 1986. At least thirteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers attended college, four in engineering and law programs. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria now consist of poor farmers planting IEDs and half-literate ISIS videographers filming beheadings, but they didn’t start that way.

  It is no stretch, then, to say that the Engineer is exactly that, college educated with a real engineering degree. Many IEDs that initially appear simple are not. They require a relatively advanced knowledge of the inner workings of electronic components—signal filtering and rectifying, microprocessor programming, the breakdown voltage of specific transistors, how to maximize the gain of an op-amp—that is beyond the scope of a household electrician or hobbyist.

  Such complexities do more than imply education. They also reveal how the Engineer thinks, as we can decipher how he solved each engineering challenge. The choice to build a redundant system, multiple blasting caps and firing systems, ensures a device will function. Multiple countdown timers prevent an emplacer from accidentally detonating a device too early. Hand-drawn schematic diagrams of IED circuits have been discovered in weapons caches in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by analyzing them we can even infer where he got his degree: Western universities teach that the symbol for electrical ground should be placed on the bottom of a sketch, while many Asian universities reverse that convention.

  In the early 2000s, just as the war was beginning, the cost of consumer electronics plummeted. Basic cell phones became so cheap as to be disposable. Many of these gadgets were perfect for IEDs, giving the Engineer a convenient foundation from which to work. His ability to modify the devices told us even more about him: when one foreign brand of cordless telephone changed the layout on its base station’s hugely complex internal circuit board, his wiring adaptation changed with it to a new physical location that was electrically the same point in the circuit he had used before. It was as if he had solved the Sunday crossword puzzle, and when someone else translated it to a new language and scrambled the verticals and horizontals, he re-solved it to discover that 5 Down was now 27 Across but, yes, “primer” still fits.

  The engineers in CEXC and the J2 fusion labs would reverse-engineer these creative design decisions, but even at an aesthetic level, a lot can be learned by the way a device is constructed. If the splattery frenzy of Pollack or the layered continuous strokes of Van Gogh reveal something of their minds, so too sloppy IEDs versus perfect rows of wires. In every part of the process there is a piece of data left behind, and the circuit design and wiring combinations became a subset of forensic evidence all to themselves.

  By virtue of his education, the Engineer’s job could not be easily transferred to someone else. Therefore, he would be protected, of the group but separate, an emir apart, traveling between theaters—Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Georgia, Chechnya, and back—lending his experience as jihad ebbed and flowed via the vastly different insurgencies fighting in each country. The original jihad that arose against the Soviets is now thirty-five years old, and as bad bombers don’t survive to influence the war, the Engineer’s teeth must grow long.

  None of this is to say that the Engineer does not need a robust implementation network in each country. He taught others important and destructive skills, how to build a new trigger or mix homemade explosives, but he would be most effective by leaving the hands-on dangerous work to others. This allows him to, literally and figuratively, keep his hands from getting dirty. When he uploads a new circuit design to a Chinese specialty manufacturing company (not in the business of asking questions) and purchases thousands of mass-produced circuit boards online, he touches nothing. The fingerprints on the metallic green wafers are not the Engineer’s or even those of his students, but rather those of the man or woman or child who assembled the board in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.

  The vast majority of IEDs recovered in Iraq and Afghanistan adhere to this al-Muhandis profile, and there are only a few examples of freelancers, upstarts like Frost’s crooked police captain, who think they can design and field their own bombs. These contraptions became the equivalent of Internet memes within the military’s classified computer system: the guy who tried to build a remote control go-kart IED, another who used spinning electric motors to strike matches. In every interview with media, an EOD tech at some point is going to say, using the shortcut, “The variety of potential IEDs is limited only by the imagination of the Bomber.” But this isn’t really true, and not just because, as we’ve seen, the term “Bomber” is overly simplistic. In practice, imagination is not enough. Designs are tested and consistent, the main product lines constantly refined and improved but not revolutionized, and the unique one-offs are simply that.

  One final note on the Engineer’s profile. Al-Muhandis has a practical and analytical mind, but it would be a Western and secular mistake to presume this leads to decreased religious fervor. As an American soldier might value courage or loyalty above technical proficiency, so among jihadists piety trumps any skill in rifles or explosives. It is a litmus test, to differentiate between pretenders and the committed, those on an angst-filled jihad holiday and the hard-core ideologues. There is simply no known precedent for an individual central to the mujahideen effort being unreligious. In fact, the opposite is true.

  In the mid-1990s, Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, was a boiling bath of blood and pain. A few thousand mujahideen held off the last vestige of the Red Army, block-by-block, utterly inhuman urban combat that would make the city the stuff of apocalyptic nightmares. To finally dislodge the muj, the Russians resorted to World War II carpet bombing and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians. Still, the Chechens recaptured the city twice, through the efforts of leaders whose names would be sung by Syrian insurgents two decades later. We know very few details of the horrors of Grozny, even less about the war stories jihadists tell each other, but we know this one:

  On one day, in the midst of the worst Russian artillery bombardment, fighting trench to trench, among the shattered concrete apartment blocks and even as rockets scattered Dragons Tooth bomblets on their heads, when the muezzin sang the call to prayer from the minarets behind them, the mujahideen put down their rifles and faced Mecca and bowed in submission and then lay prostrate and prayed as they did five times every day, as if the war was the least trifle upon the earth.

  Not a man was killed by enemy fire during their salat. A mighty fortress was their God.

  AFTER MATT SCHWARTZ died, I had made it a habit of searching for the Engineer in my own black hole database: Google.

  I tried many combinations of “bomb maker” and “traveling” and “Al Qaeda” and “Afghanistan” and “engineer.” I found what you would expect: Inspire magazine and the Anarchist’s Cookbook. I had no fear of the NSA or FBI; I was a military-trained bomb tech, and through teaching as a consultant I had access to the classified versions of everything I could find online. And I wasn’t looking for ammonium nitrate recipes anyway. I wanted a name and a photo.

  Despite my failures, I kept at it periodically, often long after my wife and children were asleep. So I don’t remember what exact combination of search items finally worked, but one groggy night Hermes reached out and through kismet or providence or luck, showed me a pattern in the chaos: I stumbled upon an academic paper by Anne Stenersen, a researcher at the Norwegian think tank Forsvarets Forskningsinstitutt. Her 2011 article, “Al Qaeda Foot Soldiers: A Study of the Biographies of Foreign Fighters Killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan Between 2002 and 2006,” contained one fascinating name. Ibrahim al-Muhajir al-Masri. Abraham the Foreign Egyptian. Killed in Pakistan in 2006, he was described as a “university-trained engineer and veteran of the Soviet-A
fghan jihad. After 2001, he was based in the tribal areas, where he was ‘an engineer for suicide operations and made equipment for suicide bombers.’”

  This was it. He fit the profile exactly. This was as close as I had come yet to naming the Engineer. I Googled “Ibrahim al-Muhajir al-Masri” and got six total hits, none of them helpful. I Googled his name without the quotes and got the wrong man, Abu Hamza al-Masri, the captured mujahideen London cleric who lost an eye and both hands trying to disarm a Soviet landmine in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I Googled shorter combinations of Ibrahim al-Muhajir, found him, but was immediately disappointed. After all that searching, Ibrahim al-Muhajir was just another name for Abu Abdul Raham al-Muhajir, the builder of the truck bombs that hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. He had avoided Gitmo, survived the initial cull of central Al Qaeda members in 2001 and 2002. Was he a smart and savvy operator, to have lived so long, or not a priority for the US? Either way, I had seen his name and face before. In his Wikipedia profile, he looks like the caricature of a Western engineer, a middle-aged wage slave dork in a bad short-sleeve dress shirt who has just taken off his tie for the day.

  But maybe Anne Stenersen knew more about these men? I began reading her other papers, published in English in relatively obscure journals. I eventually found Midhat Mursi, also known as Abu Khabab al-Masri, another Egyptian-trained engineer and chemist, a bomb expert, writer of an explosives manual, and a “freelance trainer.”

  The only references I found to Abu Khabab outside of Stenersen’s work were death notices posted by the world’s major news organizations, some misreported, some correct. We tried to kill him with a drone strike in 2006 and missed. We succeeded in a similar attempt in 2008. NBC said the FBI had used the wrong photo and the wrong name for Abu Khabab al-Masri for years in their databases; ironically enough, they put the one-eyed London cleric on the official wanted poster.

  The black hole really didn’t have a photo of the Engineer.

  But now I did. All of the correct international obituaries used the same one, endlessly repeated, grainy and two-tone. A square-headed man with a massive beard and intense eyes.

  And yet, this still wasn’t the Engineer who killed Matt Schwartz. Abu Khabab al-Masri died in 2008, and significant IED development, some of the most lethal IED developments, occurred after he died. But it was the right profile.

  THE CJSOTF J2 at Bagram didn’t look like much from the outside. Bland and monotonous sheet metal and block, it blended into the rest of the air base, a semipermanent squattersville of plywood huts and temporary trailers and dry-rotted tents that felt overly lived-in, like a hotel room that has changed occupants but never had a visit from the maid. Still, Soliman felt at home in the J2 because it was named in honor of Sergeant Gene Vance, a fellow West Virginian and Special Forces soldier out of 19th Group, who was killed in an ambush in May of 2002. Montani Semper Liberi. Mountaineers everywhere.

  On the inside, the J2 was likewise deceptively plain. Row upon row of tables and flip-up laptops for the various representatives. There was the Predator guy, the MC-12 guy, the JTAC, the analysts of the different disciplines. And projected on the wall, always, a Predator feed. “Predator porn,” everyone called it, a staple of operations centers since generals discovered how to get mobile access over a decade ago.

  She had a seat in the J2, as the biometrics girl. When she watched the Pred feed, she dreamed that someday there would be a fusion of their two disciplines, a gait recognition algorithm so people could be identified from the air just by their unique walk. In the meantime, she was content knowing her data was being used at that moment, on a mission watched by that Predator. If a report came in that a match had been made or a team needed more info, she would call the FBI or DoD biometrics centers back home in West Virginia for help. Often, she was talking to an old classmate, a friend. There were only eight biometrics engineering graduates her year at WVU. It was exciting knowing they were all working the same cases together.

  She sat with the intel analysts and watched as they put together the big picture, also using data she collected, photos and prints that she took with a SEEK. They were both military and contractors, and she could feel like an outlier. She wasn’t a triple tabber, she didn’t have the Triple Canopy—referring to Airborne, Ranger, and Special Forces scrolls worn on the left sleeve, as well as the security company of the same name that provided contractors for the DoD—but it was more than that. They obsessed over individuals. They worked the same names every day. It was insular, and exhausting, and she was glad it wasn’t her job.

  All day the analysts pumped as much data as they could into each profile. Intercepted communications. Biometrics. Geospatial trends; a fancy term for Frost’s penny-flipping. Handwriting samples from night letters, the messages of intimidation left on the doorsteps of those thought loyal to the Afghan government. Link analytics that diagrammed the inner connections of each terrorist oil spot. The information from the various exploitation cells: explosives, bullet ballistics, ripped cell phones, computers. It all goes in the portal, because when the commander comes by, the analyst transforms into a salesman.

  Sometimes the commanders needed to turn the red metrics green on the weekly PowerPoint slides. Sometimes they just got bored and wanted someone to smack, to feel like they had the initiative. No matter the reason, the commander needed a trigger, an excuse to spend energy on one target over another.

  If an analyst wanted to get the object of their infatuation on the Joint Priority Effects List—the JPEL, the hit list of high-value targets—they needed two things: a profile jam-packed with data, and a photo. It was easier to sell the story with photos. It made it personal, more than a list of aliases. It wasn’t always the SEEK photo that put the pitch over the top, but Soliman saw it happen often enough to know she was making a difference.

  She didn’t realize how isolated she really was in Baghdad and Kandahar until she got here. In the J2, she could feel the battle rhythm of the war, especially when the TIC lights came on. Troops in Contact, new military speak for a gun battle, firefight, engagement. The first time the lights came on, she didn’t know what they meant, but she sensed the air change in the room. Everyone’s body language tightened. Eventually, over watercooler chat, she learned more.

  When the TIC lights came on, it meant somewhere, out across the country, maybe with the team she had just trained, maybe in that village where so many had popped in their biometrics screening, someone at that very moment was being shot at. Someone’s truck was tumbling. Someone was hoping the jug of homemade bang was unstirred. Someone was burning from QuikClot. Someone was getting some. Someone was letting the machine gun touch hearts and minds. Someone was calling, “Good sparkle.” Someone was all business, and someone was quiet. Someone would be carried in a ramp ceremony the next day.

  IT WAS THE TIC lights that did it. As Sarah Soliman spoke, I looked at my notes and checked her deployment dates again. Yes, they did line up.

  “So, Matt Schwartz and Seidler and Bell died on January 5, 2012, when you were there. Do you have any memory of that at all?”

  She gave me a small frown. “Unfortunately not,” she hedged. “Not that particular event. You hate to say it, but … the TIC lights happen so often.”

  “No, right, I’m sure,” I started. She gave me another look, more pained if that was possible.

  “I didn’t want to assume that you would,” I said. “I thought I would ask, just in case, if …”

  Yeah, I know there is a lot of data, I get it, but these are my brothers we’re talking about now. I pushed on. Maybe I could jog her memory.

  “You know, it was actually the single biggest loss of life for EOD guys in Afghanistan ever,” I said.

  That wasn’t true, but I didn’t remember that at the time. I’ve looked it up since. In 2002, three Army EOD techs—Craig, Galewski, Maugans—and a Special Forces soldier—Romero—died when a Taliban weapons cache they were investigating exploded. Their remains were so intermingled th
ey now share a plot at Arlington. But I had forgotten that somehow.

  Soliman was still giving me the look, but I kept going anyway.

  “You know, so it might have come up?” I said. “Or maybe if any of the evidence had passed your way? Serendipity, if you crossed paths?”

  She paused. “Sorry.” And that was that.

  I had no right to be disappointed, but I was.

  “Right, right,” I said. “No, that’s okay.”

  FOR A DECADE, Hayes had worked with SOCOM all over the world, and it taught him, perhaps counterintuitively, powerlessness and humility. He put out sensors, electronic and metaphoric, and pulled in data, and still could not predict when, where, or how any terrorist cell would attack. It was at their whim, and all he and SOCOM could do was react.

  The J2 was flooded with data—MC-12 and Predator feeds and forensic reports and the biometrics database, of course—but Hayes felt like he knew nothing. Or, at least, none of the things that really mattered.

  All of the best evidence, the truly dangerous and important stuff, gets blown up, he thought. The EOD guys detonate the bomb because it’s so deadly. Or the IED is so well constructed and reliable, it functions every time. There could be an entire class of IEDs out there no one knows about. The best way for the Engineer to hide his signature is to make sure the device detonates. Then no fingerprints, no DNA, a guess at the forensics only.

  American leaders are obsessed with metrics: body counts, biometric records collected, IEDs found, men detained and questioned. Biometrics was its own worst enemy. The same guy could be enrolled in the system five times with five names and we think we did a good job because the stats look good. Worse, biometrics gave the illusion of success, helped us the find the easy guys, the pipe swingers, those that place and initiate the IEDs. But those guys are targetable anyway. You could find them all day long, and we do. But the hardest guys?