by Scott Shane
In the midst of the hunt, there was a major personnel change. The decision of Robert Gates to step down after nearly five years as defense secretary set off musical chairs: Obama asked Leon Panetta to move over from the CIA to the Defense Department and named as CIA director David Petraeus, the favorite general of many Beltway pundits and military journalists. There were mutterings that Obama wanted to eliminate the possibility that Petraeus would decide to challenge him for the presidency in 2012, a plausible notion, though Petraeus had actively sought the CIA job. Petraeus arrived at CIA headquarters in August, dressed in a business suit and leaving behind his entourage of longtime aides; both his retirement from the military and his drastically shrunken retinue were concessions to a civilian intelligence agency wary of Pentagon control. Petraeus, who as commander of US forces in the Middle East had overseen the disastrous cruise missile strike on Yemen in 2009 and had visited Sanaa often, needed no briefings on the significance of AQAP and Awlaki. He had barely learned his way around CIA headquarters when CTC briefers brought him good news: they had fresh word on Awlaki’s whereabouts.
Awlaki’s relatives had urged him to stay in his family’s tribal territory in Shabwah province, where they believed he faced little risk of betrayal. But Awlaki, who had nearly been killed near Shabwah’s provincial seat of Al Ataq, evidently decided that Shabwah had become too hot for him. The CIA got word in the second week of September 2011 that he had quietly moved north to Al Jawf, not far from Saudi territory. A little to the west there was a continuing conflict on sectarian lines, with Shia fighters known as Houthis, for the family name of their leader, regularly clashing with religious Sunnis associated with the strict Salafi community at Dammaj, where many foreign Muslims had gone to study Islam. In Al Jawf, Al Qaeda was exploiting the conflict to embed itself, paying Sunni tribesmen and telling them that the Houthis, supported by Iran, posed a grave threat. The chaos and division actually made intelligence easier to gather, generating more electronic chatter for the NSA to pick up and providing cover for paid informants. “People were optimistic that we were getting close,” said an American official tracking the hunt from Sanaa. Soon the CIA learned where Awlaki was staying and made plans for a strike—taking control of operations from JSOC for the first time. The sprawling, new CIA drone base in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, as it happened, had just become operational.
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Awlaki had spent half of his forty years in America; he had climbed the mountains of Colorado, loved the deep-sea fishing off San Diego, played with his children in suburban Washington parks. He had, for a time, praised American liberties and described Islam as a religion of peace. Boxed CD sets of his lectures on the Prophet Muhammad and the requirements for a good marriage were in the homes of law-abiding Muslim families all over America. What toxic mix had turned him into an outlaw on the run in a desolate place, notorious for championing mass murder and hunted by his own government? It was plausible to see Awlaki as just one more fanatic preaching an archaic and heartless strain of Islam—the American right’s preferred interpretation—or as a political figure radicalized by America’s bloody bumbling in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other Muslim countries, as some on the left argued. But there were more personal forces at work as well. There was ambition, driving him to find a path to fame after his own peccadilloes and suspicious government officials in Washington and Sanaa blocked conventional success. There may have been a sort of self-loathing, fury at his native country for producing the sinful sexual culture that had so enticed and entangled him. Perhaps, too, he was acting out an Oedipal drama, embracing a point of view at the opposite extreme from his father’s wholehearted embrace of America and its values.
Whatever had carried Anwar al-Awlaki on the long road to the war with America, he could not have been terribly surprised when the drones came for him again. He and his small band were sitting outside a large Bedouin-style tent where he had apparently been staying for several days, beside a rough track in Al Jawf, a short drive from Marib to the south and a little farther from the Saudi border to the north. The great ribbed desert of reddish sand swept away to the north and east. It was “Bedouin country,” said Abdullah al-Jumaili, a tribal sheikh in Al Jawf. The men were eating a breakfast of dates. With Awlaki were his protégé and Inspire magazine colleague, Samir Khan, twenty-five, another American citizen, and two tribesmen who were helping them, later identified by Al Qaeda as Abu Muhsen al-Maribi and Salim al-Marwani. One of them must have heard the distant telltale buzz or caught the glint of morning sun on the fuselage of one of the aircraft.
As in May, the Americans had thrown a lot of hardware into the mission, determined not to miss: a Reaper with multiple Hellfire missiles under each wing, plus two smaller Predators to give the shooters a good view of the ground and two lasers to better “sparkle” the target, as the drone operators liked to say about the guidance procedure. As counterterrorism officials at CIA headquarters watched on their screens, the drone operators at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada drew a bead on their targets from a distance of 8,500 miles. The men on the ground ran for their two vehicles—a Toyota Hilux pickup truck and a Suzuki Vitara SUV, according to someone who saw the aftermath. It might have seemed pointless to flee—they were in open desert, with nowhere to hide. But just a few months before, Awlaki had made a miraculous escape from the Americans. The men jumped in their trucks. This time, Awlaki’s fortune had run out. It was, in his own words, his “appointed time.” When Abdullah al-Jumaili, the local sheikh, visited the spot a few days later, there were just craters and the burned frames of the trucks.
Never before in history had the US government’s awesome power been directed to hunting and killing a single citizen. Filed away in a secret CIA archive, awaiting historians of some distant era, the strike video would have era-defining significance, showing the US government’s assault on one of its citizens, an execution without the formalities of indictment, trial, and sentencing. It was simultaneously a triumph of technology, an act of self-defense in the relentless American campaign to eliminate the risk of terrorist attack, and, in the view of some, a challenge to the Constitution and to the legal and ethical standards on which Americans prided themselves. It was a vision of a disquieting future, with the allure of push-button solutions and the erosion of venerable principles, arriving with a jolt.
A few hours later, at a flag-decked retirement ceremony for the nation’s top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, at Fort Myer in Virginia, the president who had ordered the strike took public note of it. John Brennan had given him the news in an early phone call to the family quarters in the White House. It was, for them, good news for a change. The president had plenty of other business on his mind that week: fund-raisers in Silicon Valley and Hollywood to build a war chest that would help him hang on to the presidency; a decision to seek a fast-track ruling from the Supreme Court that could derail his signature achievement, the expansion of health coverage; the arrest of a would-be jihadi who, in a disturbing turning of tables, had planned to fly remote-control planes loaded with explosives into the Capitol and Pentagon. There was news of massive flooding in the Philippines, a shocking hot spell in the United Kingdom, hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters marching on the New York Police Department, and brinksmanship with the Republicans over the budget and debt ceiling. But Anwar al-Awlaki would never again plot an attack. That was something.
As the farewell to Mullen began, Obama spoke in the coy, peekaboo language customary for official comments on the semisecret drone operations. “Before I begin,” he said, “I want to say a few words about some important news. Earlier this morning, Anwar al-Awlaki—a leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—was killed in Yemen.” The president stumbled slightly over the name of the man whose death he had ordered, and he did not say who, exactly, had killed him. The CIA strike was legally a covert action, or in the words of the law, an act “where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged pu
blicly.” But this supposed secret had topped every morning newscast, and the officers, spooks, and dignitaries gathered on the lawn didn’t need to be told. The audience interrupted with applause, prompting Obama to pause.
“The death of Awlaki is a major blow to Al Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate,” the president resumed, reprising Awlaki’s role as AQAP’s “leader of external operations” and saying that “he took the lead in planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans.” The president mentioned the Christmas bombing attempt, the bombs on cargo planes, and Awlaki’s recruitment skills. He cast the strike as part of a larger achievement for his administration, saying it “marks another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates.” The leaves on the magnolia trees behind him trembled in the breeze. “This success,” Obama said, still speaking obliquely, “is a tribute to our intelligence community.”
It was a declaration of victory in a quest that Obama had pursued for nearly two years, since his first briefings in Hawaii that had raised the possibility of Awlaki’s role in the Christmas bombing attempt. Obama had taken out the terrorist who had nearly derailed his presidency with what would have been the biggest attack since 9/11; who had repeatedly mocked the American president from his desert hideouts; who had addressed the printer bombs to the president’s adopted hometown of Chicago. Obama included the usual caveats—that AQAP remained “dangerous, though weakened” and that the United States must be “vigilant.” But for a change, as the autumn of 2011 began, the White House security team was feeling decidedly upbeat about the counterterrorism campaign. Bin Laden was gone, and now so was the Bin Laden of the Internet, as some had dubbed Awlaki. Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan had been devastated as its operatives had been picked off, and now the most America-focused members of AQAP, Awlaki and Samir Khan, were dead. The last US combat troops were leaving Iraq, and Obama had set a schedule for getting them out of Afghanistan. The drone was a big part of the story. Obama’s strategy for drastically narrowing the campaign against terrorism—Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us—seemed to be working, or so many administration officials believed. It was possible, he had demonstrated, to combat the terrorist threat without putting thousands of American soldiers on the ground.
In an interview later on the day Awlaki was killed, Obama spoke enthusiastically with radio host Michael Smerconish about the “incredibly dangerous mission” to kill Bin Laden and then about the death of Awlaki. “Did you give that order?” Smerconish asked. “I can’t talk about the operational details, Michael,” Obama replied. But he was happy to talk about the significance of the operation. In the two years of the hunt, the president had been notably quiet about Awlaki in public, reluctant to add to the cleric’s luster. But now he spoke about the threat he had posed, as plotter and as preacher. “We are very pleased that Mr. Awlaki is no longer going to be in a position to directly threaten the United States homeland as well as our allies around the world.” The Christmas bombing and the printer cartridge plot may have failed, but they showed Awlaki’s persistence. “This was a guy who was operationally involved in trying to kill Americans, and the fact that he is now no longer around to initiate the kind of propaganda that also was recruiting people all around the world to that murderous cause I think is something that’s very good for American security.”
Here and there, a few voices expressed anxiety about a president ordering the killing of an American. But they were mostly on the fringe. To many sympathetic observers, Obama was on a roll. On the Washington Monthly’s website the day of the Awlaki strike, the liberal blogger Steve Benen hailed what he called “a quiet record of foreign policy successes.” There were accolades from commentators for NBC News—the First Read blog by correspondent Chuck Todd and his colleagues declared, “No president since George H. W. Bush has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama,” though the column added that he was getting little credit in the polls. At ABC News, Jake Tapper offered a sly tribute to Obama’s boldness, listing dead militants and talking about the “terrorist notches” on the president’s belt. “Remember when Rudy Giuliani warned that electing Barack Obama would mean that the U.S. played defense, not offense, against the terrorists?” Tapper asked. “If this is defense, what does offense look like?” They were the kind of unrestrained endorsements that a politician running for reelection, even one with Obama’s bankroll, just couldn’t buy.
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The self-congratulatory mood at the White House lasted for exactly two weeks. On the prowl in Shabwah at 9 p.m. on the evening of October 14, 2011, JSOC drone operators believed they had a legitimate Al Qaeda target, the Egyptian-born media chief for AQAP, Ibrahim al-Banna. They fired their missiles at a group of seven men eating by the side of a road. When the smoke cleared and the corpses were identified, word came from Yemeni tribal sources: al-Banna had not been present. Among the dead, along with some rank-and-file militants, were Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and his seventeen-year-old cousin, Ahmed Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki.
The strike was a catastrophe for Abdulrahman’s family, a cruel blow that left them incredulous and inconsolable. For Nasser, the killing of his son, which he had fought to prevent in court, had at least the outlines of logic. He had played down the evidence of Anwar’s militancy, plotting, and alliance with Al Qaeda, but he was a rational man who knew that Anwar had called for violent jihad against America and understood the risk he was courting. Abdulrahman, his beloved sixteen-year-old grandson, was a different story. He was a happy kid who had barely begun to live. The strike devastated the grandfather, forcing him to question everything he knew and believed.
“He was a very sweet, very gentle boy,” Nasser al-Awlaki later told some American visitors. “He was very slim—he was tall but very slim. He wore eyeglasses, he’s nearsighted, and to think that Abdulrahman would be part of Al Qaeda is really ridiculous….He never carried arms in his life. He never learned to use a pistol.” Nasser had forced himself to visit the site of his grandson’s death, not far from his ancestors’ village of Al Saeed, where Anwar had lived before heading for the mountains. He talked to tribesmen who came to the scene immediately after the strike. He was told that Abdulrahman’s remains were recognizable only from one intact fragment of his body: the back of his head, with the hair still attached. The missiles, apparently two of them, had so obliterated the bodies that they could not be separated and wrapped in the traditional white burial shroud. Instead, the tribesmen had gathered the pieces of flesh and bone in an empty cement sack, they told Nasser, and buried them with Islamic rites. “Seven people,” he said, “in one cement bag.”
If the strike was an excruciating tragedy for the Awlaki family, it was also a political and strategic blow to the United States and to the president himself. The strike shattered the confidence at the White House about this unconventional war; JSOC, as they saw it, had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Killing Abdulrahman demolished the claim, already battered, that the drone operators had such crisp video of a potential target, and such leisure to study it, that they could know just whom they were killing and strike with precision. If anything, Abdulrahman looked younger than his actual age; no one who glanced at his Facebook page would have imagined him as a legitimate target. When John Brennan gave him the news, Obama was furious, instantly understanding that the killing of a teenager would taint the counterterrorism strikes in Yemen, undermining once again the claim that it was justified American self-defense or aid for Yemen against Al Qaeda, which most Yemenis despised.
Obama, said one aide who spoke with him shortly afterward, considered the strike “a fuck-up” that was profoundly frustrating. “The nature of his anger was that we’d taken a ton of care around the Awlaki issue—painstaking legal analysis, many, many meetings, very deliberative decision making, to take this action that we recognized was a substantial action”—that is, targeting an American citizen, the aide said. “And none of that was manifeste
d in the other strike.” Obama asked for a report on what had gone wrong.
There was an explanation of sorts, if not a full or fully satisfying explanation, for the mistake. At the time of his death, Abdulrahman had been in Shabwah for six weeks. Shabwah was infested with Al Qaeda members and supporters, and until September 30 the teenager would naturally have been asking among them for help and direction in reaching his father. According to multiple Yemeni and American sources, after Abdulrahman heard that an American strike had killed his father two weeks earlier, he was both brokenhearted and angry, and he decided to join AQAP’s fight against the Americans. “The son was there specifically to make contact with Al Qaeda,” said an American official who read the intelligence reports before and after the strike.
Nasser al-Awlaki refused to believe that his kind-hearted grandson would even contemplate such a move. But the evidence to support the claims that the son had decided to try to avenge the father’s death is considerable. First, Abdulrahman had remained in Shabwah for two weeks after learning that his father had been killed. In a phone call a few days before his death, he had promised his grandmother that he would return to Sanaa. While the chaos in southern Yemen certainly made travel difficult, the fact that the teenager had not started the journey home by October 14 suggests that he may have had other plans. Second, it would be both psychologically and socially understandable if Abdulrahman decided to cast his fate with AQAP. In Shabwah, he was surrounded by Awaliq tribesmen for whom revenge of a son for a father’s murder would be not just acceptable but mandatory. And in the weeks in September when he was asking after his father, Abdulrahman had probably established contact with AQAP members who undoubtedly after September 30 would have urged him to join their fight. Third, a Yemeni journalist who acknowledges being supportive of AQAP and who is in regular contact with its leaders, Abdul Razzaq al-Jamal, reported that Abdulrahman had decided to cast his lot with Al Qaeda. After hearing of his father’s death, Jamal wrote, Abdulrahman told the AQAP leader in the town of Azzan, “I hope to attain martyrdom as my father attained it.” AQAP members called Abdulrahman “Usayyid,” or lion’s cub, a reference to the Arab proverb, “This cub is from that lion,” Jamal wrote.