by Scott Shane
Four days after Bin Laden was killed, on May 5, Obama helicoptered to Manhattan to meet with survivors of the victims of 9/11. He visited a firehouse that had lost fifteen firefighters on the day of the attacks, laid a red, white, and blue wreath at Ground Zero—and made time for an interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes. A New York Times-CBS poll that morning had reported a bump in Obama’s approval rating that cheered his political team: 57 percent of Americans now approved of the president’s job performance, up from 46 percent before the raid. But what the president knew, and did not mention as he exchanged hugs and handshakes in New York City, was the true significance of the scattered news reports from Yemen that day about a strike that had killed two Al Qaeda members. What was being reported as a minor blow to AQAP was in fact a major Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operation to kill Awlaki, and it had almost succeeded. Only the next day, as Obama and Vice President Joe Biden flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet in private with members of the SEAL team who had carried out the Abbottabad raid, did word began to leak of Awlaki’s narrow escape.
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The JSOC operation in Yemen marked the end of the yearlong moratorium on strikes that had followed the two disastrous American assaults of late 2009 and mid-2010. The vast intelligence net that the United States had cast over Yemen received a reliable report of Awlaki’s whereabouts, evidently from tribal informants in the chaotic south. Awlaki was staying in Nisab, a village a short drive west of Al Ataq, the regional capital of Shabwah, where he had first lived after leaving Sanaa. On the night of May 4, learning that Awlaki would be on the move, JSOC put together an extraordinarily complex array of equipment to catch him on the road, where strikes could be carried out with the least risk of civilian casualties. It was the first American strike in Yemen in a year, against the man now at the very top of Obama’s kill list, and military commanders did not want to miss. They organized what Air Force wags called a “drive-by shooting,” dispatching at least two Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles, backed by Harrier jets and a special operations aircraft armed with smaller Griffin missiles.
Using infrared sensors that detected heat signatures and could produce ghostly images even on the darkest night, Predator operators in Nevada spotted a white pickup truck with Awlaki inside. The aircraft shot at least two missiles at it, possibly more. They missed. Though the military and CIA had largely managed to keep the problem under wraps, the performance of laser-guided missiles like the Hellfire and the Griffin against fast-moving targets was not impressive. Because the missile was often aimed from several miles away, the laser “spot” on the ground that guided it could be five or ten feet across, according to a veteran drone pilot. With that imprecision in targeting, and the missile in flight for twenty or thirty seconds, the Hellfires often missed moving vehicles. That shortcoming, in turn, led to a preference for waiting until a vehicle was parked—and that made it harder to avoid collateral casualties, since cars and trucks usually stopped outside buildings. It was a technical issue that had contributed to several bad strikes.
In this case, frustrated pilots saw the white pickup cruise on through the pitted landscape, dodging missile craters, until clouds temporarily blocked their view. Alerted by the booms, Al Qaeda fighters converged on the area, and two brothers, whom Yemeni officials identified as Musad and Abdullah al-Harad, swapped cars with Awlaki. They drove on in Awlaki’s pickup, while Awlaki, his driver, and bodyguards piled into the other car and sped away. When the clouds parted a few minutes later, a missile destroyed the pickup. Only later, from cell phone chatter and informants on the ground, did American officials learn that their quarry had escaped.
As it happened, Awlaki would give his own account of the strike to an Al Qaeda member and prison acquaintance, Harith al-Nadari, who later recounted the episode in Inspire magazine. While Nadari’s story has the tone of wide-eyed hero worship, it roughly accords with American officials’ description of events. Nadari recalled being awakened in the night in an Al Qaeda safe house by hearing the sound of distant explosions and feeling the ground shaking. When dawn broke, Awlaki showed up at the house “with a cheerful smile, so we all knew that he was the one targeted.” Awlaki recounted that he and his bodyguards had felt a shock wave and seen a flash of light, and that the glass in the truck’s windows was shattered—but the cans of gasoline in the back had not ignited. After making his escape in the borrowed SUV, he bedded down temporarily in the hills, hearing the shudder of additional strikes in the distance. At first light he made his way to the safe house, where he learned that the Harad brothers had paid with their lives for their good turn. By Awlaki’s account, eleven American missiles had been fired during the night, yet he had survived unscathed. This lucky break seemed to Awlaki a good portent: it “increased my certainty that no human being will die until they complete their livelihood and appointed time.”
By now, in fact, from the limited glimpses we have of him in 2011 as he dodged the drones, Awlaki seemed to be increasingly adopting a philosophical tone, playing the fatalist. He betrayed no doubts about the course he had chosen, abandoning his family to plot attacks against faraway strangers. In a lecture years earlier that had become a favorite with his fans, Awlaki had told the story of Ibn Taymiyyah, a puritanical fourteenth-century Islamic scholar who was jailed and persecuted for his views. “What can you do with me?” Awlaki quoted Ibn Taymiyyah as saying. “My jannah,” or paradise, “is in my heart. If you take me to jail, I’ll make dhikr of Allah,” reciting verses in remembrance of God. “If you exile me out of my land, I will make tafakur—contemplate the creation of Allah. If you execute me, I would be a shaheed,” or martyr. “I am living for al-akhira,” the afterlife, he quoted Ibn Taymiyyah as saying.
Now, as the Americans closed in, Awlaki, who had turned forty in the spring, seemed to have put aside the cocky defiance of earlier declarations from Shabwah and the gun-slinging pose. His hair was longer and his beard bushier than his style back in the city. In video footage that appears to date from 2011, probably after his narrow escape in May, Awlaki sat in a tent and spoke quietly in Arabic about dying, his face framed in dark curls. “Martyrdom is like a tree—fruits grow on it, the fruits ripen, and then comes the time for reaping those fruits. This happens in specific seasons. This is how Allah’s slaves pass through stages, until they reach a stage when it is time for them to be taken as martyrs.” Awlaki quoted the Koran and declared: “Hence the tree of martyrdom in the Arabian Peninsula has already got ripe fruits on it, and the time for reaping them has come.”
This question of martyrdom had, in fact, started a debate in the United States. Some commentators argued that American officials and media had magnified Awlaki’s importance, and now they said that killing him would merely give his message greater authority. No drone strike could kill that message, they argued. Mohamed Elibiary, a young Muslim activist in Texas whom I had consulted from time to time, wrote a piece for FoxNews.com, of all places, under the headline, “It’s a Mistake to Assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki.” Elibiary called Awlaki “a disingenuous cheerleader in the global jihad who’s preying on largely naive or troubled Western-educated youth attempting to form their identities in a global world.” But he urged Obama to rescind his kill order. The proper way to counter Awlaki, he wrote, “is not to assassinate the messenger so that he achieves ‘martyr’ status” but to encourage Islamic clerics, including Salafis, to speak out against Awlaki’s “unsound Islamic logic.”
“We must ask ourselves whether our public chest thumping in calling for Anwar’s head ‘dead or alive’ is worth the ramifications of having to chase his ghost as a martyr for the next half century, having Al Qaeda’s propaganda department embrace Anwar in death to capitalize on his martyrdom, and encourage more Muslim youth to join Al Qaeda’s disingenuous jihad to hit the ‘tyrannical Americans,’ ” Elibiary wrote. He understated Awlaki’s role in plotting attacks—Awlaki was not just a “messenger”—but he made a strong case. He noted that Egypt’s execution i
n 1966 of Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist writer who had been so horrified by American sexual ways, had helped elevate Qutb to the status of hero-philosopher of jihad, contributing to “the violent radicalization of tens of thousands in a generation that later gave us the leadership of Al Qaeda.”
But government officials, and government officials alone, were unable to join the national debate over the kill order on Awlaki. It was part of a growing body of information that might be described as “public but classified.” The addition of Awlaki’s name to the kill list had been openly reported for months by every news outlet, but it remained against the law for government officials to discuss it. So the people who really mattered—President Obama and top counterterrorism officials—remained silent on the subject. Congress held no hearings on the contentious and critical questions it raised: Was it lawful to kill an American without trial? Was it smart, or might it merely make his message more alluring? As so often in the post-9/11 era, government secrecy rules that were supposed to make the country safer were undermining democratic decision making.
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All the American strikes in Yemen since 2009 had been carried out by the military’s JSOC, which flew surveillance drones from Djibouti and launched cruise missiles and jets from ships. But as the threat from AQAP seemed to grow more dire in 2010, Obama had acted on the advice of John Brennan and approved the construction of a new, CIA-run drone base to supplement the JSOC operations. On the face of it, duplicating an expensive and complex military capability made little sense. But Obama was not happy with JSOC’s performance in Yemen: first, there were the bad strikes that had caused irreparable harm to the image of American counterterrorism efforts there, even among Yemenis who passionately hated Al Qaeda; and second, there was the Awlaki hunt—eighteen months and counting since the order to kill or capture, which really meant kill, and the job was not yet done. True, there had not been an AQAP plot directed at the United States since the printer bombs in October 2010, a likely indication that Awlaki, Asiri the bomb maker, and the rest were distracted from their scheming by the ever-present possibility of a Hellfire missile falling from the sky. But Brennan argued that building a secret drone base over the northern border in Saudi Arabia would make it easier to cover the entirety of Yemen. It would allow some strikes to be carried out as covert actions by the CIA, supposedly never to be acknowledged by the United States—and potentially without the advance approval of the government of Yemen. Most important, it would bring the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, with its years of experience carrying out drone strikes in Pakistan, fully to bear on the problem. “I think throughout there was a feeling that the CTC guys were much better—much more precise in their work—than the JSOC guys,” said one former high-ranking counterterrorism official who sat through the discussions. Why would CIA officers be better at this military task, I asked, than the military itself?
“Practice,” he said.
But there were all kinds of complications in having two agencies both cooperate and compete in Yemen. There was a rivalry between the agencies, even if individual CIA and JSOC officers generally worked well together. There were different legal foundations for strikes by the two agencies, shorthanded as Title 10 of the US Code, the military statute, versus Title 50, which governed CIA operations. Top officials spent multiple meetings discussing whether the official notifications to Congress of American military action overseas, which the White House periodically sent to Capitol Hill under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, could omit strikes carried out by the CIA in Yemen. Officials worried that notifying Congress of JSOC strikes, while omitting the CIA operations, might be misleading. And there was the awkward fact that the Saudis had insisted that the United States keep secret the location of the new base, being built in the harsh desert of the Empty Quarter about twenty-five miles north of the Yemeni border.
As usual, demands for secrecy, whether from CIA lawyers or Saudi diplomats, clashed with a basic fact: drone strikes were never secret, no matter which agency carried them out, because they blew up buildings and cars and killed people. Trying to hide what could not be hidden simply cast a moral shadow over the operations, suggesting that the United States was ashamed of what it was doing. But despite all the tangles, the two-track American war in Yemen proceeded.
Meanwhile, the Americans were losing their on-again, off-again Yemeni ally in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Under intense pressure from both massive popular protests and a brutal power struggle among Yemen’s elite, the three-decade rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh was unraveling. By May there was open combat on the streets of the capital, with a death toll rising into the hundreds. In June, after four months of calls for Saleh to step down, an explosion inside the mosque in the presidential palace in Sanaa severely injured him, and he was flown to Saudi Arabia for care. His departure was celebrated by huge crowds, but the festive tone of the early demonstrations on Change Square, which had so enraptured young Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and his pals, was gone.
Before dawn one morning in early September, after a tumultuous summer, Abdulrahman rose in his grandfather’s big house in the capital and scribbled an apologetic note saying that he had taken 9,000 Yemeni rials, currency worth about $45, from his mother’s purse. He climbed out a window to keep from waking the rest of the household, made his way to the famous gate to Sanaa’s old city, Bab al-Yemen, and caught a bus to Shabwah. He was on his way, he explained in the note, to find his father.
His motives, if hard to be certain about, were easy to imagine. He had turned sixteen on August 26 and was experiencing a rapid political coming of age as he participated in the ferment on the streets. His posts on Facebook in the weeks before he slipped away reflected multiple sides of the teenager: he replaced his profile picture with an image of a muscle-bound anime warrior; he posted his new high scores in a video game called Crazy Cabbie; he put up several snapshots of himself clowning with two friends. But in his last post, on August 20, he wrote in English, instead of his usual Arabic, what appeared to be a comment on the bloodshed in the streets: “When you kill once it’s easy to kill again and again.”
Abdulrahman was an American citizen by birth and had lived in the United States for his first six years, but his infamous father had joined a war on America. Despite the teenager’s public tribute to his absent father with the parenthetical Facebook moniker “Ibn al-Shaykh,” son of the sheikh, his posts displayed little interest in Islam. His grandfather, to whom he was very close, had always spoken highly of the United States, recalling fond tales from his life there and telling Abdulrahman that he would study there someday. His Uncle Ammar was a westernized businessman. It must have been a confusing mix. It would be no surprise if Abdulrahman wanted to see his father and talk over all the issues that his family and his country were confronting—and have an adventure at the same time. But according to his family, Anwar had not been in touch for two years, since 2009. Abdulrahman naturally assumed his father was somewhere in Shabwah, the tribal territory, and headed there to ask around about how to find him. When Abdulrahman’s mother and grandparents awoke and found him gone, they were frightened for him. The move seemed out of character, though Abdulrahman was clearly growing up. They worried that someone might have put the idea of finding his father in the teenager’s head. Given the intensity of the CIA’s search for Anwar, in fact, they feared that Abdulrahman might have become an unwitting tool of the American hunt.
In rare public remarks in July, Admiral Eric T. Olson, shortly to step down after four years as head of US Special Operations Command, of which JSOC was part, described Awlaki as a worthy adversary, calling him “charismatic” and crediting him with plots that had gotten far closer to succeeding than most. “He’s a savvy guy,” Olson said. “He knows how to hide from us pretty well, despite the fact that he’s communicating with his own people pretty well. He’s publishing a magazine in the English language that’s quite frightening. He’s a dual passport holder who has lived in the United States. He understands us a lot bett
er than we understand him.” It was a tribute that may have masked embarrassment; Olson would be departing the Special Operations Command with the Awlaki hunt, a high-priority assignment to American intelligence and security agencies from the commander in chief, unfinished.
If the US government did not understand Awlaki, it was certainly not because the government had failed to devote adequate resources to him. The NSA, working with the FBI and with the British, Canadian, and Australian intelligence services, had identified hundreds of English speakers abroad who had been in past e-mail contact with him. But persuading them to help entrap him, or spoofing their identities, would no longer work—Awlaki was too wary. NSA eavesdroppers were sitting on many phone numbers in Yemen and abroad of Awlaki’s relatives and friends, just in case he called. Saudi intelligence, which made regular payments to many of Yemen’s tribal leaders and ran its own eavesdropping and spy operations, were in regular touch with the CIA. The CIA, meanwhile, was paying its own informants directly and through a few trusted Yemeni officials, hoping for word of Awlaki’s whereabouts. The Somali Shabab commander who had been held at sea for two months before being moved to a prison in the United States, Ahmed Warsame, was sharing everything he knew about Awlaki’s habits and movements. Morten Storm, the Danish former jihadi who had delivered bugged equipment to AQAP for the CIA, had continued to communicate with Awlaki by courier, leaving a thumb drive in Sanaa in August for pickup; he informed the CIA at every step, with the idea that its agents might be able to follow the chain of couriers back to Awlaki’s hideout. But none of those channels had paid off. The close call in May had only driven Awlaki further underground.