by Scott Shane
But America thought that it could threaten lives of others. Kill and invade, occupy and plunder, and conspire without bearing the consequences of its actions. 9/11 was the answer of the millions of people who suffered from American aggression.
And since then America has not been safe and nine years after 9/11, nine years of spending, and nine years of beefing up security you are still unsafe even on the holiest and most sacred of days to you, Christmas Day.
He showed off his firsthand familiarity with American life, remembering what he called “the good old days” in the United States. “No one would bother asking you for an ID before boarding a plane,” he said. “No long lines, no elaborate searches, no body scans, no sniffing dogs, no taking off your shoes and emptying your pockets. You were a nation at ease.”
But ridiculing the American president and reveling in the shadow that Al Qaeda had cast over Americans’ daily lives was only a sideshow—Awlaki indulging himself. His real goal in speaking out from his desert refuge, and the part that sent a shiver through counterterrorism agencies, was recruitment. Brave warriors like Abdulmutallab were taking on the most powerful of countries, he said, brazenly linking jihadist killers to the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes (which the Koran echoed in different language): “You have your B-52s, your Apaches, your Abrams and your Cruise missiles, and we have small arms and simple improvised explosive devices. But we have men who are dedicated and sincere, with hearts of lions, and blessed are the meek for they will inherit the world.”
Awlaki’s explicit pitch came at the end of his short address, when he addressed himself directly to “the Muslims in America.” He had spent nineteen years in the United States, as a child, college student, and imam, and he had a visceral understanding of the competitive tugs of American liberties and of a rigid version of Islamic duty. In the place of loyalty to nation, he suggested, any observant Muslim must substitute loyalty to the ummah, the global community of Muslims. That argument was the linchpin of Al Qaeda’s appeal to the Muslim minority in Western countries. Having lived it, Awlaki understood it implicitly.
How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters? How can you have your loyalty to a government that is leading the war against Islam and Muslims?
The Muslim community in America has been witnessing a gradual erosion and decline in core Islamic principles, so today many of your scholars and Islamic organizations are openly approving of Muslims serving in the US Army to kill Muslims, joining the FBI to spy against Muslims, and are standing between you and your duty of jihad.
In other words, as George W. Bush had famously put it in his address to Congress nine days after 9/11, using a phrase that would be central to understanding Awlaki’s evolution, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Awlaki reversed Bush’s meaning but made the same point to his core audience of young English-speaking Muslims: they had to decide which side they were on.
If Awlaki sounded implacably hostile toward the land of his birth, which he said had become “a nation of evil,” the feeling was mutual. The December 24 strike in Shabwah, the southern tribal province where Awlaki was hiding on his family’s and tribe’s ancestral turf, had not technically targeted Awlaki; the legally approved targets were other leaders of Yemen’s Al Qaeda branch. Privately, some American officials made clear that they would have been pleased had the cleric turned up dead.
On January 21, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had called Awlaki “a direct threat to U.S. interests” in a report titled Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia: A Ticking Time Bomb. On February 3, Dennis Blair, the retired admiral serving as director of national intelligence, had said at a public House hearing that with “specific permission” strikes could target American citizens deemed to be a threat. He didn’t name Awlaki, but he didn’t have to. It was becoming conventional wisdom that Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen was now the most dangerous to the United States and that Awlaki now posed a greater threat than Osama bin Laden.
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Many young Western Muslims were listening to messages like Awlaki’s March 2010 “Call to Jihad,” playing again and again his goading call for attacks, and some were inspired to plot violence. Others were traveling to Yemen, like Abdulmutallab, with the specific goal of seeking out Awlaki, their Internet hero, to volunteer for jihad.
Young people who came to Yemen looking for Sheikh Anwar, the title of veneration invariably used for him by now on jihadi forums, were heading into desolate and dangerous territory. Some months after AQAP announced its formation by Saudi and Yemeni militants in January 2009, Awlaki had departed his family’s ancestral town of Al Saeed, located in a relatively verdant valley, and headed into the hills, initially occupying a modest house near an Al Qaeda training camp. The sprawling tribal governates were desperately poor: Shabwah, once a center of the ancient frankincense trade, in the south bordering the Arabian Sea; Marib, the home of the biblical Queen of Sheba, to its north; and Al Jawf, still farther north, stretching to the Saudi border. Estimates of unemployment, and they were the roughest of estimates, rose as high as 95 percent. Most income derived from payments sent from relatives working abroad in the wealthy Gulf states. The traditional Yemeni love of firearms, striking even by American standards, meant that disputes over water, business deals, or family honor sometimes turned bloody. (“They throw grenades at weddings, just for fun,” said a former American military officer who saw it happen.) The national government in Sanaa, the capital, had little authority in the tribal areas, except through negotiation. When Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s president for three decades, famously described his job as “dancing on the heads of snakes,” he was talking in part about his ceaseless efforts to buy or rent with cash, weapons, and promises the loyalty of local tribal leaders who held the real power across much of his country.
Yemen, in older books often called Yaman or “the Yaman,” literally means “country in the south.” Three-fourths the size of Texas, it occupied the southernmost swath of the Arabian peninsula, sharing a long land border with Saudi Arabia to the north and a gorgeous coast along the Arabian Sea to the south, notable for the old imperial British port of Aden. In Roman times, Yemen had been known as Arabia Felix, or Fortunate Arabia, by some accounts a reference to the relative rainfall and greenery in the southwest part of the peninsula. But in recent decades that old title was preserved only on tourist posters, in the name of a local airline, and in ironic commentaries on the dispiriting state of national affairs. Yemen had about the same population as Saudi Arabia, twenty-six million, but the oil fields gave the average Saudi an income of $31,300. In Yemen, the per capita income was $2,500. Its poverty, ironically, had preserved its stunning ancient architecture; its mud-brick towers, most famously in Sanaa’s old city, had not been razed for glass high-rises as in more affluent Arab capitals. But the modest Yemeni oil finds were running out, and more critically, so was the water. A secessionist movement had revived in the south, a Shiite group known as the Houthis was rebelling in the north, and AQAP was playing on all of these problems to lure young men to its ranks.
The jihadi recruiters had a colorful history on their side, too. Yemen was often described as “the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden,” which Yemeni officials and scholars derided as a meaningless epithet, since Bin Laden’s father had left Yemen as a boy to work as a porter in Jeddah and become a billionaire construction magnate. Al Qaeda’s founder, they noted, had grown up in luxury in Saudi Arabia. But Yemen had other associations that gave it particular relevance for Al Qaeda. The country had a long history of jihadi movements, and Bin Laden had helped finance them in the late 1980s. In 1996, when Bin Laden was being pressured to leave Sudan, he told the London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi that “the choice is between Afghanistan and Yemen. Yemen’s topography is mountainous, and its people are tribal, armed, and allow one to breathe clear air unblemished with humiliation.” Tho
ugh in the end he opted for Afghanistan, Bin Laden maintained an intense interest in Yemen and stayed in contact with militants there, especially his former secretary Nasser al-Wuhayshi, who had escaped from a Yemeni prison in 2006 and had formally announced the formation of AQAP under his leadership three years later.
Despite the occasional bombing and an old tradition of kidnapping, Yemen had long been popular with Westerners looking for an inexpensive place to learn Arabic. A subset of the language students, whether Muslim by heritage or converts to Islam, also were drawn into Islamic studies, and some of them made their way to Dammaj in Yemen’s northwest to join an austere community of Salafis—devotees of a school of Islam dedicated to the ways and beliefs of the salaf, or early followers of Muhammad. A few of the devout wandered off to try to link up with AQAP.
Theo Padnos, an American writer who lived in Sanaa and spent time in Dammaj, memorably described the lure of Yemen for drifting or searching foreigners. Padnos noted that Abdulmutallab, the future underwear bomber, had lamented in an Islamic forum in 2005 his isolation and depression as a student in England. For such lost souls, he wrote, Yemen could seem like the solution to all of life’s problems.
“The beauty of life in Yemen for someone like that is that it really can make them happy,” Padnos wrote. “You wear the ancient robes. You memorize the ancient texts. The more you gain control over the Islamic mysteries, the stronger you feel. You don’t physically triumph over anything, but there are times when the studying, the fasting and the support of one’s brothers come together perfectly. At these moments you really do begin to feel the immanence of victory. Your loneliness and depression aren’t bothering you anymore. You’re on to bigger, more thrilling things.”
In early 2010, chagrined at their failure to identify Abdulmutallab as a threat, counterterrorism officials scrambled to identify other Awlaki devotees who might have the necessary documents to be able to board planes to the United States. The American embassy in Canberra, Australia, sent a cable to Washington one month after the Christmas attack with the names of twenty-three Australian citizens or longtime residents who were “of security interest because they have either an historical or current association with Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, or are based in Yemen or the surrounding region and may come into contact with al-Awlaki.” The list came from Australian intelligence. In the cable, under a post-9/11 program with the curious name Visas Viper, the embassy proposed adding eleven of the people to the no-fly list and twelve to the “selectee” list, which would flag them for greater scrutiny at the airport. Of the twenty-three, six were women, targeted for special attention because, the cable said, “recent threat information suggests AQ Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is looking to identify a female for a future attack.”
The day the cable was sent from Canberra, a Senate report claimed that as many as three dozen American ex-convicts, who had converted to Islam in prison, had gone to Yemen to study Islam or Arabic and that some had subsequently “dropped off the radar.” The FBI cast doubt on the eye-popping number. But such reports only heightened fears about Yemen and put more pressure on the Obama administration.
One case that illustrated why officials were so worried about the threat posed by Americans returning from Yemen was that of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, born Carlos Bledsoe. A troubled Muslim convert and Awlaki admirer from a middle-class African American family, Muhammad had dropped out of Tennessee State University and traveled to Yemen in 2007, seeking a more authentic experience of Islam. It is unclear whether he succeeded in meeting Awlaki, but he was eventually arrested by Yemeni authorities and deported to the United States in January 2009. He had already been infected with the notion that it was his duty to use violence to defend Islam from its supposed enemies. In June 2009, after experimenting with various ideas for attacks, Muhammad drove by a military recruiting station in Little Rock and opened fire with an SKS semiautomatic rifle, killing one soldier and wounding another. He was arrested, and three weeks after the failed Christmas bombing, with Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch in the news, Muhammad wrote the judge from jail, saying he wanted to plead guilty. His letter captured the way a supposed religious imprimatur could lend grandiosity to what looked like a moronic and meaningless act of murder. “I don’t wish to have a trial,” he wrote. “I’m affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” The attack, he told the judge, “is justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad—to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.” Muhammad would later be sentenced to life in prison.
Another American drawn to Awlaki and Yemen was a young martial arts black belt, Sharif Mobley. During his first trip to Yemen in 2008, he met with Awlaki. He returned to Sanaa in 2009 and was arrested by Yemeni authorities in a sweep of suspected militants after the Christmas attack; later he was charged with murder after killing a Yemeni guard in an attempt to escape. After his January arrest, Mobley was visited in Yemeni custody by two American investigators, one saying he was from the FBI and the other from the Defense Department. The Americans had only one man on their minds, Mobley’s lawyer said later.
“Awlaki,” the agents said. “You help us find him and you’ll go home.”
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If it were not for the post-9/11 clampdown on access to the airspace above Washington, an hour’s helicopter tour might have offered an instructive survey of the security archipelago that had been embarrassed by the Christmas attack and now was focused on hunting down Awlaki. This was the “intelligence community,” a Mister Rogers term for agencies that often behaved more like hostile tribes, ready to do whatever it took to protect their turf. Under public fire after the exposure of the long list of flubs that had allowed Abdulmutallab to get on Northwest Flight 253, they were united only in their uneasy defensive crouch.
On the Virginia side of the Potomac River, there was the venerable CIA, whose officers in the Lagos embassy had met with Abdulmutallab’s worried father. In a sparkling glass tower down the road was the National Counterterrorism Center, created after 9/11 with the sole purpose of pulling together threat information from different agencies—say, the several tidbits about the possible threat posed by the young Nigerian. In the same new Liberty Crossing complex was the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI’s office was yet another layer added atop the sixteen intelligence agencies and subagencies—an eye-popping total that included some agencies whose existence few Americans suspected (who knew there was Coast Guard Intelligence?). The extra layer had been created explicitly to promote greater coordination and information sharing—to prevent just the kind of lapses that had occurred before December 25. From Liberty Crossing the tour might swing west past Dulles Airport to admire the famously plush headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office, responsible for buying and launching spy satellites, whose construction using a hidden slush fund had set off a scandal in 1994. The budget-busting fleet of satellites designed and launched by the NRO were paying new attention to the desolate parts of Yemen where Abdulmutallab had met with Awlaki and gotten his training. From here, in every direction, stretched the high-rise office suburbs where scores of spook contracting companies were thriving on the ballooning black budget.
Pivoting back toward the Potomac, our jaunt to spy on the spies would cross over the Pentagon, with its chastening 9/11 memorial, and into Washington, overflying the White House and the exasperated president. Just to the west would be the State Department, with its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and to the east the FBI, its headquarters still embarrassingly bearing the name of J. Edgar Hoover as it struggled to remake itself as a sophisticated intelligence agency. The copter might circle above the temporary headquarters north of the White House of the Department of Homeland Security, cobbled together from twenty-two disparate departments and agencies in the post-9/11 intelligence reorganization, and then cross the Anacostia River to view the fancy complex of the Defense Intelligence Agency on the grounds of Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. From there we might follow the B
altimore-Washington Parkway north a few miles to the spacious Fort Meade campus of the National Security Agency, whose more than thirty-five thousand eavesdroppers, linguists, codebreakers, and computer geeks made it the largest of the intelligence agencies. In early 2010, its files on Anwar al-Awlaki were growing by the hour.
And that would just about do it. Well, actually not. We would not have gotten a direct look at Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, the intelligence units at the Energy and Treasury Departments and the Drug Enforcement Administration—or the aforementioned Coast Guard Intelligence, one outpost that had managed to avoid criticism for the Christmas Day disaster.
Together, these agencies constituted a distinct kingdom, one with its own jargon and culture, all but invisible to the general public that was paying the bill. And the bill was considerable. The intelligence colossus was spending some $80 billion a year, dwarfing even peak Cold War spy budgets in real terms (though that was just an educated guess; until 2007, the government had actually refused to disclose total intelligence spending, making historical comparisons difficult). In 2010, the Washington Post shocked readers of its “Top Secret America” series with an estimate that 854,000 people held top-secret security clearances; but the following year official numbers were finally released, showing that in fact the real total was more than 1.4 million. And the number of people with any kind of security clearance, a large fraction of them contractors and not government employees, had passed 4 million and was still rising fast. This was the secret army of government experts, the long list of agencies and the cascade of tax dollars that existed to stop the Abdulmutallabs of the world, and that had failed.
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Nothing motivated this far-flung empire like the ire of a president. In a quixotic effort to mimic the business world, the agencies spoke of the government officials who read and relied on their work as “customers.” There was no customer nearly so important as the one in the Oval Office. Obama had repeatedly made clear his anger and frustration at Abdulmutallab’s effortless penetration of the post-9/11 security bulwark on Christmas, calling it a “systemic failure” while still in Hawaii and declaring publicly after his January 5 meeting with security advisers that the agencies’ performance was “not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.” The six-page summary of the White House review of the episode, pulled together by John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism aide, and released to the media on January 7, 2010, was lacerating in its language: it used the word failure ten times and referred to “human errors,” “systematic breakdowns,” “shortcomings,” and a “breakdown of accountability.”