by Scott Shane
Intelligence analysts believed Awlaki himself was the intellectual force behind the magazine and its sponsor within AQAP, with Samir Khan as the hands-on editor. “It was Awlaki’s baby,” said a senior American specialist on Yemen who closely tracked the publication. But for anyone who had followed the unlikely career of Samir Khan, Inspire arrived with a feeling of déjà vu. Its madcap, attention-deficit-disorder style was almost identical to that of Jihad Recollections, a magazine that Khan had produced for four issues from his parents’ basement in Charlotte, North Carolina, before departing for Yemen in 2009 to join Awlaki. There was the same odd mix of fundamentalist religion and hip-hop attitude; it was the product one might expect from a talented juvenile at a new-age madrasa.
Two of my colleagues, Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet, had visited Khan in 2007 in his parents’ North Carolina home, where his father was waging an unsuccessful struggle to turn his son away from militancy. His parents, Zafar and Sarah Khan, were Pakistanis who had emigrated to Saudi Arabia, where Samir was born, before moving to the United States in the early 1990s. Samir had gone to high school in Long Island, scandalizing classmates by refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. After moving with his parents to North Carolina, he devoted all his time to creating radical websites. Just twenty-one, he spoke with an arrogant confidence in a New York Times video, his bushy beard silhouetted against a window. The death of disbelievers was “no concern of mine,” he said, since they were “the people of hellfire.” “The American army, the American government, is losing this war. And the Muslims are winning this war,” Khan declared. It was hard to know how seriously to take this disaffected kid. He claimed to be doing nothing illegal, just sharing the truth about Islam. “I’m not telling people to build bombs,” he said.
With the appearance of Inspire three years later, that had changed. Among the most avid readers were the Awlaki trackers at the NSA. Even before the first issue in midsummer 2010, NSA found a way to intercept the copies before they went online—and in some cases to watch as the latest issue was compiled. As a result, American counterterrorism analysts working on Yemen would get each issue two or three weeks before it appeared on militant web forums. They examined the pdf files forensically for electronic clues to Awlaki’s location and combed over the substance of each article for hints, intentional or inadvertent, as to what AQAP was planning. But the main effect of each new issue of Inspire, according to people in the agencies at the time, was to amp up the hysteria about the threat that terrorists in Yemen posed to America.
At the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center, some officials thought there should be a formal government response to the magazine. They advanced the familiar argument that the United States was engaged in a battle of ideas and that it should not shy away from the fight or leave the field to Al Qaeda. Others, including Will McCants, a young scholar advising the State Department on radicalization, said that any formal response would simply elevate the magazine and give it greater importance. “Inspire magazine really rattled the people inside the government,” McCants said. “The thinking was, ‘Here is Al Qaeda in English. It’s going to mobilize English-speaking Sunni youth to carry out attacks.’ ” But McCants argued that there was a danger of overreacting. He countered “the idea that Muslims were automatons who you place inflammatory material before, and they act.”
A number of scholars, in fact, consistently argued that Western journalists were exaggerating the importance of both Awlaki and his magazine. They noted that inside Yemen Awlaki was little known beyond small circles of militants, devout foreigners drawn to Yemen, and members of his own extended family and tribe. Considering that just over 1 percent of Yemenis had Internet access and that Awlaki operated almost exclusively in English, he could hardly have reached a broader audience inside the country. The skeptics suggested that Awlaki’s rise resulted from a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy by both the foreign media and the Obama administration. By writing about him, the international press raised his profile and drew the attention of impressionable young Muslims to him. By declaring publicly that he was the most dangerous terrorist for the United States, American officials gave him greater status in the AQAP hierarchy and with fellow jihadis.
There was more than a grain of truth in such claims. Western journalists, frustrated that most Al Qaeda ideologists operated in Arabic or other languages they did not know, naturally zeroed in on Awlaki’s ubiquitous English-language writings and lectures. The resulting flood of coverage in the West, starting in late 2009, gave him an international spotlight unmatched by any terrorist other than Osama bin Laden. When Wuhayshi, the AQAP leader, proposed in a letter to Bin Laden in August 2010 that Awlaki should take his place as emir of the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen—an unusual moment of self-effacement in the bluster and braggadocio that characterized Al Qaeda—he undoubtedly was trying to capitalize on all the attention Awlaki was getting globally. (Bin Laden, in his secret compound in Pakistan, was not caught up in the Awlaki sensation and may have been a little jealous. He swiftly nixed the idea.)
But the timeline of developments undercuts the notion that Awlaki’s significance in the terrorist world was the inadvertent creation of the international media and hysterical bureaucrats. While he was little known to the general public, Awlaki was a star in the English-speaking Islamist world for years before he drew attention from the media. By the time American and European reporters first noticed him, in late November and December 2009 after the Fort Hood attack, he was already a significant figure in AQAP and was in the midst of helping organize its most dangerous plot, the Christmas airliner attack.
Inspire magazine, while brilliantly designed to stir media interest and provoke Americans, reached its target audience of young Western Muslim men without the help of the mainstream media. The cocky, colloquial style and the constant appeals to those in the United States to mount attacks there rattled authorities for a reason. In most cases of US residents charged with terrorist plotting since 2010, investigators have found evidence that the defendants had downloaded and read the magazine. Some of the ideas proposed in the magazine for attacks were ridiculous (spilling oil on roads in hopes of causing cars to slide off, or welding sharp blades to the front of a pickup truck and driving into a crowd). But the basic bomb-making and detonation instructions in Inspire, even if presented under a jokey headline, were quite adequate for killing and maiming, as authorities would later discover in the Boston Marathon bombing.
Awlaki’s personal contribution to the first issue of Inspire was especially dogmatic and vicious, even by his escalating standards. His article focused on the flap over Western cartoonists who had drawn images of the Prophet Muhammad, often derogatory and in any case prohibited by strict Islamic doctrine. In Denmark, where a newspaper had set off a furor by publishing such cartoons, some imams decided to bring groups of young Muslims to Copenhagen for meetings with Danes to promote dialogue and mutual understanding. Awlaki, who in the months after 9/11 had been a regular at interfaith meetings in Washington, now denounced the clerics’ efforts as “completely misguided.”
“So what is the proper solution to this growing campaign of defamation?” Awlaki asked, and answered: “The medicine prescribed by the Messenger of Allah is the execution of those involved.” As usual, he based his case on precedents from the Prophet’s life: those who “spoke against” Muhammad in the seventh century, he wrote, had been killed, including “women who sang poetry defaming Muhammad.” For him, no dialogue was necessary; examples from fourteen centuries ago settled the matter. He went still further. Killing such cartoonists, he said, was “a golden opportunity” for service to Islam, a greater religious duty even than protecting Muslims by “fighting for Palestine, Afghanistan, or Iraq.”
In his previous calls for violence, Awlaki had usually avoided the specific and personal. No more. This time he suggested an appropriate target for murder: “A cartoonist out of Seattle, Washington, named Molly Norris started the ‘Everybody Draw Mo
hammed Day.’ This snowball rolled out from between her evil fingers. She should be taken as a prime target of assassination along with others who participated in her campaign.” The Inspire article was illustrated with a close-up of a handgun, for readers who lacked imagination.
Awlaki was directing his grand jihad at a rather modest target. Norris was a dog lover and part-time cartoonist, barely known even in Seattle, who had been disturbed by the decision in April 2010 of Comedy Central to censor an episode of the irreverent South Park show that portrayed Muhammad in a bear costume. On a whim, she drew a satiric poster designating May 20 as “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” and portraying everyday objects such as a spool of thread and a cup of coffee claiming to be “the real likeness” of Muhammad. The tone was light; she invented a sponsor called “Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor.” But her modest attempt at a jocular defense of free speech struck nerves she had never intended, prompting both threats to her and other free-speech advocates from Islamic fundamentalists like Awlaki and bigoted attacks on Islam from others.
“I wasn’t savvy,” Norris told City Arts magazine, the Seattle publication that ran many of her cartoons. “I didn’t mean for my satirical poster to be taken seriously. It became kind of an excuse for people to hate or be mean-spirited. I’m not mean-spirited.” But it was too late. Norris took down her website and Facebook page and, at the advice of the FBI, adopted a pseudonym, all for fear that someone might carry out what Awlaki described as “the pinnacle of all deeds” by killing an obscure cartoonist and thus sticking up for the Prophet.
As the first issues of Inspire stirred excitement in the second half of 2010, the agencies hunting for Awlaki felt even more heat. A pointed question came up repeatedly at the White House and in the congressional intelligence committees: How could this skinny, bespectacled preacher and his sidekicks, hiding in barren mountains, and with the entire American government after them, have the equipment, security, leisure, and self-confidence to put together issue after issue of a slick magazine? It was an embarrassment.
By the time Inspire made its debut, there were targeters at both the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command working exclusively on him. They studied every snippet of signals intelligence, tracked the vague reports of the cleric’s travels on large-scale maps of Yemen—and handled a daily barrage of queries from higher-ups, sometimes including the highest-up of all. Obama “was very focused on him,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser. “Awlaki and Asiri were seen as irreplaceable figures, Asiri because of his bomb-making skills, Awlaki because of his unique mix of inspirational and operational, and his knowledge of the United States.” Questions came from the regular meetings on Yemen at which Obama presided, as well as the Tuesday terrorism meetings in the Situation Room. The Senate and House intelligence committees demanded regular updates on the hunt for Awlaki and the situation in Yemen.
It was a topsy-turvy moment that captured the way terrorism upset the ordinary hierarchies of global power. Perhaps never in American history had a country so insignificant economically and militarily—Yemen’s annual gross domestic product was less than Walmart took in each month—attracted so much attention from the top leaders of the United States. But the agencies judged that AQAP, with Awlaki as recruiter and Asiri as master bomb maker, was capable of launching attacks that could penetrate all of America’s defenses.
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As a spy for Western intelligence inside Al Qaeda, Morten Storm was an infinitely rare creature. During the Cold War, Western spies traditionally had posed as diplomats and, if detected, rarely risked more than expulsion from Moscow or Beijing. Aging CIA veterans boasted of the difficulty of operating by “Moscow rules,” under the relentless gaze of Soviet counterintelligence. But Al Qaeda honored no rules at all. Anyone suspected of spying for a Western government would be tortured and executed without hesitation. And instead of trolling for informants at embassy receptions or scientific conferences, a spy penetrating Al Qaeda would have to travel into the wilds of Pakistan’s Waziristan or Yemen’s Shabwah, often beyond the reach of communications and with no backup to summon in case of emergency.
But as Storm had demonstrated when he switched sides in 2007 and became an informant, Al Qaeda was surprisingly susceptible to infiltration. The terrorist network, after all, invited and accepted volunteers from every country and had no real way to check their credentials. Anyone with a few months of practice at the jargon and dogma of the Salafi-jihadi world could pass as a legitimate Al Qaeda recruit. For Storm, who had met a who’s who of militants in Britain, Yemen, and Somalia in his years in the movement, persuading others of his devotion to the Al Qaeda cause posed little difficulty. Awlaki, who had first gotten to know him in the Islamic study circle that Storm had hosted in Sanaa in 2006, seemed to trust him implicitly when he returned to Yemen on several subsequent trips. He had no way of knowing that Storm had switched sides—celebrating his abandonment of Islam in typically outlandish style by ordering a bacon sandwich and a beer with Danish intelligence officers.
Awlaki entrusted to Storm, in fact, a most intimate quest, extremely sensitive from both a personal and an operational standpoint: the search for a Western wife. Having sent away his first two wives, he was pining for female company. Remarkably, at the very time that he was becoming deeply involved in the most sensitive Al Qaeda operations—late 2009 and early 2010—Awlaki was simultaneously angling to import a wife from the West. It is hard not to make a connection with Awlaki’s reckless behavior with prostitutes in San Diego and Washington. Then, lust had led him to risk his career as an imam; now he was putting his life in danger by sending e-mails, albeit encrypted, to entice a blond Croatian woman to join him in the mountains of Yemen. The matchmaker was to be Storm, who recounts the yarn in his 2014 memoir Agent Storm. Aminah, a pretty thirty-two-year-old Muslim convert, had appeared on Awlaki’s Facebook page, responding in November 2009 to Storm’s post there seeking “support” for the sheikh. By Storm’s account, Aminah, whose real name was Irena Horak, herself suggested that she was prepared to become Awlaki’s wife—and was not deterred when informed that he already had two others, not counting the New Zealand woman who had married him and then fled in 2008.
With Storm as the intermediary, the two exchanged encrypted e-mails—Awlaki insisted on a photo—and then personal video messages in which they both sounded like shy teenagers trying out an online dating service. In his e-mails, Awlaki was blunt about his arduous living conditions and other demands. His other two wives had found village life intolerable, he told Aminah, and sometimes he lived in a tent. He made no effort to hide his patriarchal view of marriage: “I do not tolerate disobedience from my wives,” and in a disagreement “it must go my way.” That sounded like a reflection of the old-fashioned tribal ways to which he had returned, but it was not that simple. After arranged marriages to Yemeni women, the first chosen by his own family and the second by a pair of brothers who were fellow jihadis, Awlaki was clearly looking for something different. In Yemen’s conservative, gender-segregated society, women were kept apart from men’s work and understandably were often sexually unsophisticated. “I would love a wife that is lightweight and part of my work,” he wrote. “Having lived most of my life in the West I would like to be in the company of a Muslim from the West.” He was irresistibly drawn to the culture against which he was now trying to wage war. But Aminah was game.
What the technology-enabled lovebirds did not know, of course, was that Storm was working for the CIA, which monitored all the communications and carried out surveillance of Storm’s first meeting with Aminah in Vienna. In an interesting reflection of the different ethical assessments of allied spy agencies, British intelligence dropped out of the wedding plans. MI-6, according to Storm, was unwilling to help send an unwitting woman, whose only experience in the Arab world was at a resort in Tunisia, to her possible death in the desert with Awlaki in an American missile strike. Storm’s main CIA handler, whom he knew as Jed, a Metallica f
an with several children and a Doberman, seemed to have no such qualms; perhaps he was confident that CIA drone operators would be able to catch Awlaki away from his new wife.
But the wariness of Awlaki’s associates who met Aminah at the airport in Sanaa foiled the plan to use his Croatian bride to track him down. The gray Samsonite suitcase and the electronic Arabic dictionary Storm had given her—which he understood contained tracking devices—were dumped by those who picked her up. She was directed to repack her clothes in a plastic bag. Awlaki soon e-mailed Storm with his thanks—“She turned out to be better than I expected and than you described”—adding a smiley face that Storm took to be a lascivious reference to her charms.
The scheme had failed. But by then, Storm, who had played his role in the foiled effort with verve and care, had already received $250,000 in CIA cash as his reward. He photographed it in his mother’s kitchen—an open attaché case stuffed with packs of hundred-dollar bills. It was becoming obvious that there were few limits on what the agency, under heavy pressure from the White House, would spend or do to find their target.
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In the Hadda neighborhood of Sanaa where Awlaki’s parents and now his first wife and five children lived, upscale by Yemeni standards, both FedEx and UPS maintained modest storefronts. There was nothing especially memorable about the young woman who visited both shops on a Wednesday in late October 2010, dressed in black, her face veiled, like virtually every woman in the capital. She showed the ID of a student at Sanaa University and paid in cash to dispatch Hewlett-Packard printers still in their boxes.