by Scott Shane
ALSO BY SCOTT SHANE
DISMANTLING UTOPIA
How Information Ended the Soviet Union
Copyright © 2015 by Scott Shane
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
TIM DUGGAN BOOKS and Crown colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available upon request.
ISBN 9780804140294
eBook ISBN 9780804140300
Map by Robert Cronan/Lucidity Information Design, LLC
Cover design by Eric White
Cover photograph by Google Earth/DigitalGlobe
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For M, L, and N,
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CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Scott Shane
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Epigraph
PART ONE 2009–2010 1: Merry Christmas
2: You Are Still Unsafe
PART TWO 1990–2002 3: He Had a Beautiful Tongue
4: An Exquisite Weapon
5: We Are the Bridge
6: Totally Planning to Stay
7: Stealthy, Agile, and Lethal
PART THREE 2002–2009 8: That Was the Transformation
Photo Insert
9: WWW Jihad
10: I Face the World as It Is
PART FOUR 2010–2014 11: The Guy Everyone Wanted to Find
12: The Time for Reaping
13: A Bigger Brand
Acknowledgments
Notes
PROLOGUE
In the summer of 1984, Nasser al-Awlaki spotted a chance to take his growing family from Yemen on an extended visit to the United States, where he had spent nearly a dozen memorable years as a student and young professor. He grabbed it.
Dr. Awlaki applied for a grant from the Ford Foundation to attend a monthlong seminar at Stanford University on a cutting-edge topic, applications for the new machines called “microcomputers.” His years as a graduate student in New Mexico and Nebraska in the 1960s had yielded a PhD in agricultural economics and an assistant professorship in Minnesota and prepared him for a distinguished career serving his country. He would serve as Yemen’s agriculture minister, be named president of Sanaa University, and found another Yemeni university. Now he thought his children, especially the eldest, his thirteen-year-old son Anwar, were old enough to appreciate some of the wonders of American life.
Nasser al-Awlaki was a classic technocrat. Like generations of Muslims from the Middle East who had come to the United States for an education, he had found something more—an enticing openness, freedom from the straitjackets of tradition and authoritarian government, and, of course, a taste of economic abundance. Arriving as a Fulbright scholar in 1966, he had been dispatched to Lawrence, Kansas, for English-language training and was astonished to discover that he could have all the milk he could drink at the student cafeteria. After he began his studies at New Mexico State University, his host family in Las Cruces invited him to both their churches—the husband was Protestant and the wife Catholic. They fed him lamb and rice for Sunday dinner, figuring that menu might be familiar and comforting for a young man so far from his Arabian home.
“That was my introduction to America—good families and good people,” he recalled, sitting with me in his spacious house in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, nearly half a century later.
In the late 1970s, Nasser and his wife, Saleha, had brought home to Yemen warm memories of their American years. She took pride in baking an exotic dessert she had mastered while overseas: apple pie, a recipe from her Betty Crocker cookbook. He got up early many mornings to watch the softball interviews of politicians and celebrities on Larry King Live—live in Sanaa, too, via satellite.
On their way to the Stanford computer seminar in that summer of 1984, Nasser and Saleha and their four children stopped in New York City and bought a video camera, which was quickly commandeered by Anwar, their skinny, bookish teenager. “He was our cameraman for the whole trip,” Nasser remembered. Anwar had been born in New Mexico when his father was a graduate student and spent his first seven years in the States, barely speaking Arabic when his parents moved the family back to Yemen. Now their oldest child proudly recorded weekend visits to Yosemite, Disneyland, and SeaWorld in San Diego. He accompanied his father to the Stanford seminar, too, growing fascinated with computers and their vast promise.
When the Awlaki family strolled the streets of Manhattan on the way west that idyllic summer, a lanky, brown-skinned young man a decade older than Anwar was walking the same crowded sidewalks. At twenty-two, Barack Obama was chafing a bit at his first postcollege job, researching and writing on business for a financial publisher and consulting firm, half-joking with his mother that he was “working for the enemy.” Soon he would follow his idealistic instincts to the New York Public Interest Research Group, a branch of Ralph Nader’s activist empire, and from there to his famous stint as a community organizer in Chicago.
Like Anwar al-Awlaki, Barack Obama had been born in the United States to a secular-minded foreign father of Muslim background who had come on scholarship to further his education. Like young Anwar, he had left the United States as a child and lived in a Muslim country. Obama stayed in Indonesia only from ages six to ten, clearly a visitor, while Anwar al-Awlaki lived in Yemen, surrounded by extended family, from seven to nineteen. When they returned to America, their unusual backgrounds and upbringings led to struggles for both men over allegiance and identity, with radically different outcomes. Obama would embrace America and ultimately vault to the pinnacle of power, his election as president in 2008 sending a message of empowerment and possibility that resonated with millions overseas, including the Awlaki family. Awlaki would briefly sample American fame, becoming a national media star as a sensible-sounding, even eloquent cleric after 9/11 when Obama was still an unknown. Later, he would gradually and then decisively reject America and finally devote himself to its destruction. The men would never meet, except virtually, clashing in the public battleground of ideas, where the cleric’s mastery of the Internet would serve his jihadist cause, and violently, when Obama dispatched the drones that carried out Awlaki’s execution.
Awlaki’s death secured him a place in history: at least since the Civil War, he was the first American citizen to be hunted down and deliberately killed by his own government, on the basis of secret intelligence and without criminal charges or a chance to defend himself in court. Many Americans welcomed his demise, but its extraordinary circumstances, and the unsettling precedent it set, sparked a debate about law and principles that would go on for years.
When Nasser al-Awlaki brought his family to Ronald Reagan’s America, “Islamic terrorism,” a loaded phrase that would become a ubiquitous cliché after 9/11 and that Anwar al-Awlaki would do so much to seed in the English-speaking world, was already well known. In 1983, catastrophic bombings by Iran-backed militants had hit the American embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing some 258 Americans. In September 1984, shortly after the Awlakis had headed home to Yemen, the Beirut embassy annex would be attacked, with twenty-four dead. But the US homeland—a word then rarely used, perhaps because for many Americans it carried an unseemly whiff of Nazism—still seemed safe from attack, protected by oceans from foreign enemies. The threat of such terrorism was distant and not so formidable. It had not yet remade the government, drained the federal budget, saturated popular culture, and overw
helmed all other associations of Islam.
This book grew from an obsession with three questions: Why did an American who spent many happy years in the United States, launched a strikingly successful career as a preacher, and tried on the role of bridge builder after the 9/11 attacks end up dedicating his final years to plotting the mass murder of his fellow Americans? How did a president and former professor of constitutional law, who ran against the excesses of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism programs and vowed to forge a new relationship with the Muslim world, come to embrace so aggressively the targeted killing of suspected terrorists, sometimes with the emphasis on “suspected”? And what was the role of the technology that would link Obama and Awlaki, the armed drone, which was created to meet the challenge of terrorism, killed some very dangerous people, got oversold and overused, and further poisoned relations with Muslims worldwide?
As one of the many American reporters thrown into the maelstrom of terrorism and counterterrorism after 9/11, I wanted a deeper understanding of the disturbing arc of recent history. The life of Anwar al-Awlaki, who knew two of the future 9/11 hijackers at his San Diego mosque in the months before their plot unfolded, and who was killed a decade later after a high-tech, no-holds-barred manhunt, seemed to encompass the era. His story spanned four presidencies, raised in pointed ways the dangers of both terrorism and the reaction to it, and seemed emblematic of the defining conflict between America and an extreme school of Islam.
To the bafflement and alarm of many Americans, the bigoted and murderous ideology of Al Qaeda and its imitators, including the self-described Islamic State, has shown striking resilience. Militants who, like Awlaki, seem to offer mainly an anachronistic theocracy and a pedantic devotion to religious law, enforced with extreme violence, are still winning devotees and making headlines in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. In the United States and Europe, some of Awlaki’s fervent admirers have followed his teachings with lethal effect, at the finish line of a road race in Boston and at an editorial meeting of an irreverent newspaper in Paris. His own unlikely evolution and influence offer a case study in a phenomenon that is still shaping world history and unsettling the West, which has long assumed that its own answers to existential and practical questions held universal appeal.
—
Two young children, a girl and a boy, solemn and silent, had opened the metal gate in the wall around the Awlakis’ house and led me across a yard with toys scattered about and to the door, where their grandfather waited. With a start, I realized that they were Anwar’s youngest children. When I visited Yemen, a land of haunting beauty and rich culture, it had descended into what seemed to be a semipermanent condition of violence and political chaos. There was news of fierce fighting near the Sanaa airport. A bomb had gone off in the middle of the previous night, followed by mortar fire. Visiting foreigners were being kidnapped regularly from the streets of Sanaa; their ransoms, if they survived, fattened the payroll of Al Qaeda. But inside Nasser al-Awlaki’s home, with its crowded bookshelves, rich carpets, and memorabilia of academic life, a dignified quiet reigned. The little girl brought a tray with cups of tea for her grandfather and me.
Now, as we talked, the gentlemanly Dr. Awlaki, gray-bearded at sixty-seven, seemed bewildered by the tragedy that had overwhelmed his life. The country that had once so warmly embraced Nasser and his family had relentlessly hunted his son Anwar, incinerating him with a drone-fired missile, and then, in a cruel coda, had killed Anwar’s own sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who had no history of terrorism, in a second drone strike.
Even as he riveted the attention of Washington’s vast secret bureaucracy, Anwar al-Awlaki was also part of a wrenching family drama, the rebellious son resisting the entreaties of his devoted father. Years earlier, as Anwar’s growing militancy drew the attention of American and Yemeni authorities, Nasser had struggled to steer his son away from a career as an imam, nourishing the hope that he might still apply his talents and education to the overwhelming practical problems of Yemen. When that failed, he tried to talk Anwar out of his radical views, so antithetical to his own.
When none of that worked and Anwar’s own plotting led the Obama administration to authorize his killing or capture, Nasser al-Awlaki went to court in America in 2010 to challenge the order on constitutional grounds. After all, he had long revered the American legal system, in particular its insistence on giving rights even to despised criminal suspects. It was the beginning of a long, anguished, and ultimately unsuccessful effort to get the United States to live up to the principles he still believed it stood for.
“I have no grudge toward the American people,” Nasser al-Awlaki told a group of Americans who visited him after the drones had killed his son and grandson. He wrestled aloud with the contradictions that events had thrust upon him. “After all, I was an American product myself. All my education, all my thinking, my view of the world, you know—I developed it in America. I was so engulfed in the American way of life. I was so much attached to it. And after so many years, this thing happened to my son and my grandson. I never dreamed that one day America would do something against me—never. But that’s what happened. So I just have to deal with it in a responsible way.”
He could have responded, he said, “like any tribal people,” with violence or protests. “No, I went to the American system of justice—that’s what I did. I never raised a gun. I never asked anything to be done against America or American citizens or anything else. I would never dream of doing something like this, never. But I went to the American justice and law, and I hope that I will get accountability from the American justice system.”
As we sat together early in 2014, discussing the troubled relationship between the United States and the Muslim world, Nasser al-Awlaki thought back to that golden California summer of 1984 and seized upon a passing moment that for him summoned up an earlier, happier time. At the car rental company in Palo Alto that summer, he recounted, he had explained sheepishly to the woman behind the desk that his old Minnesota driver’s license had long since expired and that his current Yemeni license was in Arabic.
No problem, the woman said—just scribble down in English what the Yemeni license says, and I’ll use that. And he did, and she did.
“That was the America I knew,” he said, with a sigh. “Nobody was snooping on anybody. Nobody was stopping anybody.”
His cup sat almost untouched on the low table between us, the tea grown cold. The light was fading over Sanaa’s ancient tower-houses, and the call to prayer could be heard from a mosque a few blocks away.
Speaking of the deaths of his son and grandson at the hands of the country that had given him so much, he showed flashes of anger and exasperation, but mostly puzzlement and a deep, irremediable pain.
How could his family’s life have taken such a turn? What had gone wrong? Who was to blame?
“I loved America,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. He seemed to be near tears. Then, after a moment’s silence: “I still love America, despite everything.”
The Prophet beckoned with his hand towards Yemen and said, “Belief is there.”
—HADITH
(saying of the Prophet Muhammad) No. 5670, narrated by Abu Masud, seventh century
But what is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad?
—JOSEPH CONRAD,
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, 1907
Perfection of means and confusion of aims seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN, 1941
PART ONE 2009–2010
1
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Sheikh Anwar had instructed him to make sure the airliner was over American soil when he pushed the plunger on the syringe. With only sixty minutes left in the eight-and-a-half-hour flight from Amsterdam, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab kept his eyes fixed on his video screen, tracking the location of the big Airbus as i
t moved across the map. Nearby, other passengers dozed and watched movies.
When the tiny image of the plane approached the American border, the twenty-three-year-old Nigerian squeezed past the American college student next to him and retrieved a small bag from his carry-on in the overhead compartment. Then he headed to the bathroom, where he made one last check on the equipment, performed a ritual washing, and doused himself with cologne to cover any chemical odor. He was a warrior now, one of the mujahideen. He’d soon be a shaheed, a martyr for Allah, only for Allah. America was his target, chosen for him in Yemen by Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki.
It was America, after all, that was slaughtering Muslims in so many countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and now, of course, Yemen. It was to Yemen, the land that the Prophet Muhammad had once declared to be the home of true belief and wisdom, that Abdulmutallab had come a few months earlier in search of Sheikh Anwar, whom he knew from hours online listening to the cleric’s calm, erudite lectures.
Over time, Abdulmutallab had found his way from Sanaa to Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki’s hideout in Shabwah province in the south. The sheikh had tested him and found him worthy of a martyrdom mission. He had then sent him to Brother Ibrahim, the bomb maker, who had explained to him the technical details of pentaerythritoltetranitrate, the explosive known as PETN, and had fitted him with the strange undershorts that had the plastic bag sewn inside. Always the diligent student, Abdulmutallab had worn the underwear for three straight weeks, removing it only to shower, so that he could grow accustomed to it and make sure it was not noticeable to the people he encountered.
As the airliner descended toward Detroit, Abdulmutallab returned to his seat, mumbling to his seatmate that he did not feel well. He pulled the blanket over his head and groped for the syringe attached to the bag in his underwear. This was the moment he had trained for, for which he had given up an easy life as the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker.