Vickers and I became close friends. Along with Brennan, Vickers and I were probably more focused on al Qa‘ida than anyone else at senior levels of the US government. Earlier in his career, Vickers had served in the Special Forces and as a CIA operations officer. He had been deeply involved in CIA’s support to the Afghan rebels fighting to drive the Soviet Union out of their country. In the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, his character is the brilliant young CIA weapons analyst who plays multiple games of speed chess in the parks of Washington, D.C. My kids thought I was cool because I knew a guy Hollywood made movies about.
* * *
One of the main issues with which the deputies grappled was that of US drone operations. These operations have been the single most effective tool in the last five years for protecting the United States from terrorists. There is no doubt in my mind that these strikes have prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11. They have decimated al Qa‘ida’s core leadership in South Asia. Multiple al Qa‘ida leaders there have been removed from the battlefield, and the group is having a hard time attracting new recruits, raising money, and plotting. The strikes have also weakened the leadership of al Qa‘ida in Yemen and they have disrupted attacks against the United States by the group there.
Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of the strikes are Bin Ladin’s own thoughts on the subject. In documents recovered from his residence after the 2011 US raid that killed him, we learned that Bin Ladin considered drone strikes the most effective US weapon against his group. We also learned that he obsessed with discovering how drone operations worked and what countermeasures might defeat them.
Discussions about the law were always an important part of any deputies’ meeting, particularly those on drones. Collateral damage is permitted under the laws of war. When done right, drone strikes are incredibly precise and collateral damage is minimal, and every effort is made to prevent such damage. Collateral damage is not zero, but it is close to zero, as these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the missiles they carry are among the most precise weapons in the history of warfare.
What to make, then, of the claims of significant collateral damage? They are highly exaggerated. The claims flow from propaganda on the part of al Qa‘ida and other groups that want the strikes to stop. They are also a result of counting as US collateral damage the women and children killed by air force strikes by the countries where the United States operates drones. And they stem from human nature—a reporter visits a mother and father of a deceased terrorist, who honestly believe that their son is innocent and would never join an extremist organization. The parents tell the reporter that, and his death gets marked as collateral damage.
When I was deputy director, a superb American reporter contacted the government to say that she was going to write a story about the significance of the collateral damage from drone strikes. She pointed out that her company, a leading U.S. media outlet, had helped pay for a compilation of a comprehensive list of drone strikes and their outcomes. She had dates and locations of individual strikes over an extended period of time and the number of women and children killed in a number of the strikes. She said the number of innocents killed was much higher than the estimates that she was hearing from US officials and asked for a comment.
Because CIA tries to carefully monitor the truth about what damage is actually caused by US drone operations, I was tasked by my superiors in the administration to invite her to my office to talk about the data. I requested that she send her list of alleged US strikes to us ahead of time. I had each of the strikes on her list investigated.
When I sat down with her, I went through the entire list. It had three categories: (1) US strikes on her list that had occurred but had killed no women and children while her list said they had, (2) US strikes on her list that in reality were strikes by the local military, and (3) US strikes that simply had not happened and for which there was no local military action either. By far, the largest category was the first. I would tell her, “Your data says there were six people killed in this particular strike, including three children. I can tell you that there was a US strike on that day but that only two adult males were killed.” The only other thing I wanted to do—but could not do—was show her the US government’s video of each strike, so she could see with her own eyes the number and type of people killed. It turned out that there were no women and children killed in any of the strikes on her list.
I spent well over an hour with the reporter—going over every alleged strike on her list—and at the end she decided to walk away from the story, as she no longer believed that the study was credible. In fact, I believe she walked out of my office concerned that the data were deliberately misleading. She was a reporter who was most interested in getting the facts right, and she impressed me greatly that day.
In deciding to allow me to have this conversation with the reporter, the government recognized that we had a classic dilemma. The public hears bad things about the accuracy of these strikes. We say, “They are very accurate, trust us.” The response is “Show us some proof and we will believe you.” But we can’t because of the sensitivities involved. It is not surprising that this argument is unconvincing. While such media interactions like the one I had can help, what we have to rely on is that the congressional oversight process works as it should. For a long time, congressional committees have played an important role in overseeing drone strikes. As the public’s representatives, they must assure themselves that these activities are much more carefully administered than critics suggest, and they must say so to the American people. And they have done so on multiple occasions with regard to US drone strikes.
* * *
Collateral damage is not the only drone issue that many commentators get wrong. Another is the very nature of the weapon system itself. Some call it unique in that the individual firing the weapon is so far away from the target, which makes it impersonal, more like a computer game than a war. The often unstated implication is that because it is impersonal one is somehow more likely to use it than a traditional weapon system. But drones are far from unique. There are many such weapon systems in the US inventory. What is the difference between a drone pilot and a sniper looking through a scope and pulling a trigger a mile across the battlefield? What is the difference between a drone operator and a B-2 pilot dropping ordnance from fifty thousand feet? What is the difference between a drone pilot and an Aegis ship’s weapons specialist who pushes the button that causes a cruise missile to travel hundreds of miles to a specific target on the globe? There is much hype about drones—almost none of it bearing any resemblance to reality.
Some very reasonable questions include: Don’t drone strikes actually create more terrorists? Don’t they radicalize the friends and relatives of those killed by drones? Don’t they radicalize others who deeply believe, despite the facts, that many civilians, including women and children, are being killed in drone strikes? Don’t they put on the battlefield more terrorists than they take off? Perhaps—we just don’t know. What leads people to choose violence in the pursuit of their political and religious ideals is complicated. But even if the critics of drones are right and they create more terrorists than they kill, what is the alternative? You must deal with the immediate threat in front of you—the terrorist who is planning to attack the United States and kill our citizens—even as you work to deal over the longer term with the issues that created that threat in the first place.
Here is another way to think about this particular aspect of the drone issue. Counterterrorism operations using weapons fired from drones target individuals the United States believes pose a direct and imminent threat to Americans—either overseas or in the homeland. Are we better off as a country dealing with that threat by using unmanned aerial vehicles where no US servicemen or servicewomen are put in peril, or by putting US boots on the ground and therefore at risk? I think the answer is an easy one.
* * *
This chapter has been a story of al Qa‘ida’s vulnerabil
ity and resilience. What is the source of this seemingly inconsistent duality? There are two. First, terrorists are very easy to remove from the battlefield, but stopping the recruitment of new terrorists is a nearly impossible task. And second, terrorism is not a capital-intensive enterprise. To be successful, one needs leadership, operatives, some money, and secure operating space. Those things are very easy to take away—and also very easy to retrieve.
* * *
The digging of the tunnel began in the bathroom of a women’s mosque in Yemen. Al Qa‘ida operatives methodically dug toward a nearby maximum-security prison where nearly two dozen of their colleagues were being held. They dug for two months. The tunnel, roughly 150 yards in length, ended underneath a prison cell block.
On February 5, 2006, twenty-three al Qa‘ida operatives escaped through the tunnel. The escapees included Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who today leads al Qa‘ida’s number one franchise, al Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He is also now the number two to Ayman al-Zawahiri in the overall al Qa‘ida organization; if Zawahiri were to depart the scene, Wuhayshi would be in charge. Another escapee from the prison was Jamal Badawi, who had led the al Qa‘ida cell that attacked the USS Cole. The Yemenis were embarrassed, and the United States was furious.
Prior to the jailbreak, AQAP had been effectively defeated in Yemen. Following a flourishing after 9/11, US and Yemeni military action had ended the threat from AQAP. Now, just weeks after the jailbreak, AQAP was back in business. And just twenty-five months later, it again posed a major threat. In March 2008, AQAP fired mortars at the US embassy in Sanaa but hit a nearby girls’ school instead. And then, in September 2008, AQAP militants dressed as police officers stormed the US embassy with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. Twelve people were killed, including one American. The explosive marks are still visible on the walls of the embassy.
One prison break made all the difference. It was a perfect example of the thin line between the vulnerability and the resilience of al Qa‘ida.
CHAPTER 7
No Mickey Mouse Operation
In 2009, when I was serving as the third-ranking official at CIA, the Agency hosted a visit from Kevin Bacon. That’s right. That Kevin Bacon. He was in DC playing in a band, and our Office of Public Affairs invited him. So I hosted him for a thirty-minute courtesy call. The discussion was wide-ranging and turned at one point to six degrees of separation. Bacon jokingly said, “I’ll bet there are even six degrees of separation between Usama bin Ladin and me.” Without missing a beat, our most senior operations officer, who I had invited to the meeting, replied, “Since you walked into this room, the degrees of separation between you and Bin Ladin became a lot less than six.”
* * *
When he slipped away from us in Tora Bora, Bin Ladin virtually disappeared. There were lots of rumors, and occasional “sightings,” but we had virtually no intelligence on where he was or what he was up to because his operational security was that good. Some observers speculated that he might be dead. Our view, based on little evidence, was that he was alive, probably living somewhere in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan—still the ideological leader, but not the day-to-day operational leader of al Qa‘ida. We assessed that day-to-day management had passed to Bin Ladin’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
We were mostly on our own in the hunt for Bin Ladin. For their part, the Pakistanis and the Afghans pointed fingers only at each other—with the Pakistanis saying with certainty that he was in Afghanistan, not Pakistan, and with the Afghans saying he was in Pakistan. I cannot remember a single time when either country brought us a lead on Bin Ladin.
At CIA we could not afford to fixate on Bin Ladin alone—pursuing him as if he were some white whale. The evil that he’d spawned was metastasizing and causing undeniable threats to the United States and our allies around the world. But Bin Ladin remained the primary target because he was the named leader of the group and was such a powerful motivator of jihad both in South Asia and around the world. I never despaired about getting him, but it was enormously frustrating to have so little information with which to work. It was also frustrating to have to regularly answer the question “So why haven’t you caught Bin Ladin?” from Congress, the White House, and the media. One of our senior operational officers came to answer that question with a sarcastic quip that was nonetheless true. He said, “Because he is HIDING!” My answer to this question was that it was hard, and I would go on to note that it had taken the FBI seventeen years to find the Unabomber and seven years to find Eric Rudolph, the bomber at the Atlanta Olympics, and that these guys had been hiding in the United States, on the FBI’s own turf, not on the other side of the planet in someone else’s country.
Jose Rodriguez, the now-retired former director of our Counterterrorism Center and former head of all clandestine operations at CIA, told me that he’d once gotten so tired of answering the question about why we had not yet caught Bin Ladin that he swore he would say “Fuck you!” to the very next person who asked. That evening at home, over dinner, Rodriguez’s wife Patti innocently asked, “So why haven’t you guys got Bin Ladin yet?” Rodriguez did not tell me how he’d answered.
We had a very systematic approach to trying to locate Bin Ladin. We devoted extensive effort to learning about and locating his far-flung family. That approach never bore fruit. Another thread was to focus on his public utterances. Periodically Bin Ladin would issue an audio statement—and on rare occasions he would release a video. Agency analysts seized on those occasions to study technical details, images, background, and the like—trying to identify anything that might suggest even a general location for Bin Ladin. We tried to reverse engineer how the messages had gotten from Bin Ladin to the media outlets that broadcast them—to see if we could backtrack to their originator. Despite the great expenditure of resources, particularly in terms of analysts’ time, this approach did not produce dividends either.
The other path we pursued was figuring out how he was communicating with his immediate subordinates and then using that link to find him. We assumed that Bin Ladin was too savvy to use modern technology to communicate and instead was relying on couriers to stay in touch with his terrorist organization. Starting in 2002, we learned from detainees of a person who had worked with Bin Ladin prior to 9/11 and who had worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) after 9/11. One detainee told our officers that this individual served as a courier for messages to and from Bin Ladin. Another detainee speculated that he was the sort of person who could be living with Bin Ladin. The guy’s nom de guerre—his Arab nickname—was “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.”
What particularly caught our interest was the reactions of the two most senior al Qa‘ida detainees in our custody—KSM and Abu Faraj al-Libi. By the time we asked them about Abu Ahmed, both were cooperating with us, answering our questions in great detail. Regarding Abu Ahmed, however, KSM said he remembered him but he denied that Abu Ahmed was Bin Ladin’s courier and he said that Abu Ahmed had left al Qa‘ida after 9/11—statements inconsistent with what the other detainees had told us. And Abu Faraj insisted that he did not know Abu Ahmed and indeed had never even heard of him—again directly contradicting what others had told us about a close relationship between the two. The coup de grace occurred when KSM returned to his cell after the questioning and communicated to other prisoners that they should not mention anything about “the courier.” Both KSM and Abu Faraj, who had given us information extremely damaging to al Qa‘ida, were going out of their way to protect Abu Ahmed. Our interest in the courier was now sky-high.
It took us several years to learn Abu Ahmed’s true name and several more years to find his general location—somewhere in Pakistan. We did this by employing the capabilities of CIA to recruit human sources and of the NSA to collect communications. It was a team effort. Then our challenge was to pinpoint his location, put eyes on him, and surveil him until he took us to the next lead. At that point we didn’t know if he was the courier—the individual with direct
access to Bin Ladin—or merely a courier who would only lead to other couriers. But we hoped that if we could find where he lived he would in some way lead us to his boss.
* * *
During one of the thrice-weekly CT sessions in August 2010, senior CTC officials told Director Panetta and me that they needed to talk privately to us after the main meeting. They had something to report. This was not an unusual event, as CTC often had something sensitive to tell us. We called it “going small.” But “going small” on this particular day was the most significant such meeting I ever attended.
“We have found a guy we know as Abu Ahmed,” CTC told us. They said, “He is living in the town of Abbottabad, Pakistan,” and explained that his residence was within a stone’s throw of the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. They told us the history of Abu Ahmed and the history behind the lead. They told us that Abu Ahmed was living in Abbottabad along with his brother, Abrar. They said they did not know for certain that Abu Ahmed was a courier for Bin Ladin, but the fact that he and his brother were practicing extraordinary operational security—for example, powering up and using their cell phones only when they were miles from Abbottabad—made them of great interest.
The CTC briefers handed out satellite photos of the place where the brothers were living. It was a compound with walls twelve to eighteen feet high and topped with barbed wire. The facility had internal walls that seemed to segment the compound, and the main house had a strange lack of windows. Most unusual was that there was an outdoor terrace off the third floor, surrounded by a privacy wall. “Who puts a privacy wall around a patio?” Panetta asked. “Isn’t the whole purpose of a terrace to see out?” “Exactly,” said one of the analysts.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 15