Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror

by Michael V. Hayden

  I demanded a full explanation for the misidentification. There was no dodging or excuses. People were thoroughly, maybe even excessively, contrite. He was a bad man, but he wasn’t the target.

  I reflected a short time, then told them to study what went wrong and make corrections, but to keep their focus looking through the windshield. “I’ll take care of the rearview mirror.” Later that day I sent word that “if you find another target to nominate this afternoon, I’m still interested.” It was a vote of confidence. I later learned that it was a very big deal for the targeting crew.

  I knew we could do this. By early 2008 I was convinced that the IC could routinely provide exquisite intelligence to enable precision targeting. Our task was to convince the rest of the government that we could and that they should take advantage of it.

  We had one other thing going for us that we knew would not last forever. As director of CIA, I got to talk to this president every week without any filters. Who knew what it would be like in a year?

  I briefed President Bush every Thursday morning on sensitive collection and covert action, and I began to use these sessions to point out the growing al-Qaeda footprint and brazenness in Pakistan’s so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. My chief analyst on this was a lanky Notre Dame graduate who lived and breathed this work. He educated me almost daily, and I tried to pass this on to the president. The main point was that as bad as this might be for Afghanistan and our forces there, this was fundamentally becoming a threat to the homeland.

  I never uttered the following sentence to the president, the vice president, or to Steve Hadley through the first half of 2008, but if we had boiled down all of our briefings to just a few words, the essence would have been: “Knowing what we know now, there will be no explaining our inaction after the next attack.”

  I pretty much hit the same theme in the summer of 2008 when I briefed the threat, the intelligence, and potential responses to a large gathering of agency, State, and DOD officials in Dubai. In the federal bureaucracy, that’s called “socializing an idea.” They seemed to get it.

  The US government slowly started to put its toe in the water against al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. A charismatic al-Qaeda operations chief was killed early in 2008. The strike was clean and the target so important that even regional reaction was muted.

  Later in the year another AQ senior, active in planning attacks in the West, was killed along with several lieutenants in a similar strike with similar precision and with a similarly restrained response.

  In between, a terrorist-affiliated compound was hit as a group gathered. Same result. Same response.

  In midsummer, Hellfire missiles ripped through the body of yet another senior AQ operative (who had been active in their WMD program and who had a $5 million price on his head in the US Rewards for Justice program) and a group of his assistants as they were sleeping in a courtyard to beat the oppressive summer heat.

  The United States had finally begun a sustained and robust campaign of targeted killings in South Asia from unmanned aerial vehicles.

  Progress had been good, but we knew that we had to proceed carefully. Steve Hadley reminded everyone that mistakes, especially early mistakes, would be devastating. He added that all of this had to be at a digestible pace for domestic and especially for foreign audiences.

  And it became clear very quickly that some things would not be digestible. In early September, American forces made a shallow penetration into Waziristan in pursuit of militants. Although the raid was successful, it had not gone cleanly, and there were claims of civilian casualties. Islamabad responded very forcefully, lodging a formal protest, with Parliament passing a resolution condemning the action, while Ambassador Patterson was called to the Foreign Ministry for a dressing-down. It was reported that the usually dispassionate director general of military operations, Ahmed Shuja Pasha,* completely “lost it” when discussing the raid. The Pakistanis also closed the crucial Torkham highway for a day, an unsubtle reminder that the United States and NATO depended on Pakistani forbearance to use this critical supply route to Afghanistan.

  In a perverse (but welcome) way, the raid may have made targeted UAV strikes along the border more acceptable from the Pakistani point of view. Pakistani tolerance also seemed to increase later in September when a suicide truck bomber killed over fifty people in an attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. Some there even went so far as to say that the war on terrorism now had to be Pakistan’s war too.

  Based on publicly available sources, there were nearly three dozen attacks like the one on the senior WMD operative in the last seven months of the Bush administration, almost three times the total of the previous four years combined. Those same sources report that eighteen named senior and mid-level Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders were killed.

  The intelligence on which these strikes were conducted was exquisite, based on human intelligence, technical collection, and the near-continuous unblinking stare of the Predator itself. The strikes were particularly telling on al-Qaeda’s operational leaders, who had to move and communicate. They couldn’t afford to hunker down like bin Laden and Zawahiri, whose main contribution to the movement was pretty much just staying alive.

  Not that we weren’t interested in the top leaders. We worked hard to locate them; I still remember the briefing I got in late 2007 or early 2008 from our bin Laden cell saying they had a promising lead on a courier they believed might lead them to bin Laden. We didn’t lack for executive emphasis either, as President Bush began most of my Thursday morning briefings for the last six months of his administration with the simple question “Well?” followed by reminding me how many days he had left in office.

  My only defense was to show him the chart that we had drawn up of the important operational leaders we were chasing and point out the increasing number of Xs drawn over their faces.

  There were other attacks, dubbed “signature strikes” by the press, that were designed to disrupt known al-Qaeda locations and activities even when specific identities were unknown. Some have criticized these as indiscriminate. They were not.

  In fact, intelligence for signature strikes was quite robust, since it always had multiple threads and deep history. How else to make a judgment about this compound, at this time, with these visible clues? The data was near encyclopedic.

  Many such strikes actually killed high-value targets whose presence may have been suspected but was not certain. And we made no excuses about killing lower-ranking terrorists. The United States viewed these attacks as legitimate acts of war against an opposing armed enemy force, and in warfare it is regrettably necessary to kill foot soldiers too. The signature strikes had the effect of shrinking the enemy’s bench and the AQ leadership’s sense of safe haven. They also had the indirect effect of protecting intelligence sources and methods, since, from the ground, the strikes may have looked more random than they actually were.

  It wasn’t long before intelligence reporting began to confirm our success. There was genuine mental anguish in the vulnerable al-Qaeda leadership. The attacks were seen as brutal and unrelenting and there was no obvious solution to them. There was literally no place to hide.

  Years later, in 2015, an American court case against an al-Qaeda member prompted the government to release eight documents from the trove of bin Laden letters captured in Abbottabad in 2011. Bin Laden’s correspondence with his chief lieutenants in 2010 is remarkable in its candor and in its confirmation that we got the intelligence right both before (the targeting) and after (the intended effects) the strikes began.

  The letters also confirm that we got the threat to the West and to the homeland right. They are filled with references to foreigners supporting al-Qaeda or undergoing training and preparation. The list includes citizens or residents of Uzbekistan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Germany, Bulgaria, Britain, Australia, Canada, the Maldives, Kurdistan, Libya,
Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Iran, and the United States.

  The centrality of America as a target is never forgotten. In one correspondence bin Laden emphasizes that “operations inside America are some of the most important work of the Organization, as long as they are possible, because they affect the security and economy of the American people as a whole.”

  Bin Laden recommends that a German brother give “an idea about how work is done inside America.” Then he identifies an American (Azzam al-Amriki) “who can follow up on research posted on the Internet by Western centers, especially the American ones. He could also translate whatever is useful to the brothers in this field, and write his opinions about work inside America.” Bin Laden even suggests he conduct English-language classes for some.

  The letters reveal the incredible stress being felt within the organization as a result of the strikes. They read like a running eulogy of senior AQ figures with whom bin Laden was familiar. “I convey my condolences regarding our great brother Sheikh Said . . . [who] died as a martyr during a spy plane attack. . . . We think we must announce his death because he is a senior person who had addressed the Ummah [the community of believers] and the Ummah knows him.”

  “The strikes by the spy planes are still going on. . . . Our brother Al-sa’di [Ihsanullah] . . . was the latest to become a martyr. He was killed about a week ago, also by air raids. . . . The mid-level commands and staff members are hurt by the killings. Compensating for the loss is going slowly.”

  “I am informing you about the death of brother Hamzah Al-Jawfi. . . . It came at the hands of spy planes in southern Waziristan; others were killed with him but we are not sure who yet.”

  “The issue got more complicated after the killing of Muhammad Khan and Brother Mu’awiyah Al-Balushi. . . . They went to find out about places . . . and upon their return they were also martyred in an air strike.”

  The signature strikes were also taking a toll, physically and psychologically. A bin Laden lieutenant complained after “the killing of twenty brothers in one place on the day of Eid” that they had “gathered for the holidays, despite our orders and our emphasizing to avoid gathering in one place . . . but sometimes they discuss matters and take their own decisions.”

  Al-Qaeda acquired a healthy respect for American intelligence. “As we see it, based on our analysis, they are constantly monitoring several potential or confirmed targets. But they only hit them if they discover a valuable human target inside, or a gathering, or during difficult times (like revenge attacks for example).” The last wasn’t true, but it didn’t hurt that they thought so.

  The seeming ubiquity of reconnaissance and the suddenness of strikes were wearing them down. “As you know,” went a report to bin Laden, “everybody is threatened—as long as he moves—by a missile.” And, “The strikes by the spy planes are still going on. . . . The planes are still circling our skies nearly every day.”

  Folks in the field entreated bin Laden: “We would like your guidance. Especially on this idea: reduce the work; meaning stopping many of the operations so we can move around less, and be less exposed to strikes.”

  A suggestion was raised. “There is an idea preferred by some brothers to avoid attrition (the loss of staff, leaders, and the organization’s old elites). The idea is that some brothers will travel to some ‘safe’ areas with their families, just for protection. They would only stay for a time, until the crisis is over, maybe one or two years.” The author offers some ideas for safe havens: Sind, Baluchistan, Iran.

  Two months later bin Laden agrees they should be taking refuge in safer areas and “calming down and minimizing movement.”

  All of this correspondence released from the Abbottabad haul was from 2010, but it is consistent with the intelligence picture we were building as 2008 wore on. The strikes were having the impact we desired and the impact we expected. The al-Qaeda main body along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was spending a lot more time worrying about its own survival than it was planning how to threaten ours.

  Still, there was nervousness in our government that this campaign would shred an already tattered relationship with Islamabad. Others suggested that this could create chaos on the ground. I once coldly responded, “Maybe, but chaos is not a safe haven. Remember, this is about threats to the homeland.”

  But chaos wasn’t our objective. Al-Qaeda was. Collateral damage was a continuing concern, and the United States worked hard to avoid it.

  In that strike against the WMD operative noted earlier, his grandson was sleeping on a cot near him in the compound. The Hellfire missiles were carefully directed so that their energy and fragments splayed away from him and toward his grandfather. They did. But not enough.

  His grandfather was a very dangerous terrorist. He had a garage full of chemicals and an intent to use them. He was hard to locate and people were risking their lives to find him. The United States took the shot. We sincerely regretted the child’s death.

  We always tried to get better. Carefully reviewing the video after one very successful strike, one could in retrospect discern—as a GBU was in the air hurtling toward an arms cache—an obviously frightened woman, responding to an earlier weapon that had just detonated, bolting with some young children into the path of the incoming bomb from a place of relative safety. That resulted in our putting more eyes on targets as they were being struck to avoid such things.

  Despite such incidents, I think it a fair assessment that the targeted killing program has been the most precise application of firepower in the history of armed conflict.

  The accuracy and effectiveness of this US government campaign was one of the things that I was asked about by President-elect Obama in December 2008. He was very attentive. Greg Craig, the president’s incoming counsel, later told me that my views had convinced the president-elect of the program’s utility. I’m not sure how much convincing he needed, but once in office President Obama doubled down on targeted killings, to great effect, as the Abbottabad documents attest.

  Al-Qaeda prime, that original organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan, was made a shell of its former self and that was well before the bin Laden kill. All the whooping and hollering on Pennsylvania Avenue and in Lafayette Square the night of bin Laden’s demise probably represented a sense of closure for much of the public (and for intelligence professionals, too, based on the phone calls I got that night). But the United States had been killing al-Qaeda operations chiefs routinely and serially for three years by then.

  The longer they have gone on, though, the more controversial drone strikes have become. Part of that has been the inevitable claims (exaggerated, but not wholly inaccurate) of collateral damage. Part of that has been the traumatizing effect of these killings on local populations (true enough, even in the face of intelligence and other reporting that suggests most Pashtuns rarely shed tears for the deaths of bullying Arabs and Uzbeks). Part of that was also the product of a troubling American habit, confined largely to political elites, of complaining that intelligence agencies have not done enough when they feel in danger and then complaining that they have done too much when they are feeling safe again.

  In truth, though, targeted killings have always had multiple effects, and some of those were bad—effects like straining relationships with allies (especially Europeans who legally did not support this) or seeming to confirm al-Qaeda recruiting narratives about the perfidy of the Crusaders. Then there was indirectly incentivizing al-Qaeda to put more emphasis on the franchises away from the FATA. Indeed, the very success of targeted killing in South Asia accelerated al-Qaeda’s efforts to metastasize into its now more dispersed, albeit less capable, affiliates.

  But in 2008 (and apparently continuing into 2009 and 2010) these effects were all trumped by the first order effect of killing those who were already able and willing to do us harm. And as far as the strikes helping al-Qaeda to recruit, nothing would have prompted more flocking to the bla
ck banners than a spectacular AQ success.

  I usually thought of this in terms of the deep fight and the close fight. The close fight in this war meant dealing with those already committed to killing us. For handling them, targeted killing was ideal. The deep fight, on the other hand, was about the production rate of those who would intend us harm in one, three, five, or ten years. That was a tougher fight, largely ideological, and how we conducted the close fight could affect the deep fight, especially if it accelerated recruitment or deepened sympathy.

  Even as we waged the close battle, we always had the deep fight in mind. In those three weeks when I was Barack Obama’s CIA chief, I discussed a successful strike on al-Qaeda on the margins of a White House Situation Room meeting. After the session Rahm Emanuel, the blunt new chief of staff, surprisingly congratulated me on CIA’s role in the kill. I thanked him, but felt compelled to add, “Rahm, remember. That was a CT success. Unless we change conditions on the ground, we’re going to get to kill people forever.”

  Concerns over the “foreverness” aspect of this eventually began to show up in presidential comments, culminating in a major presidential speech in May 2013. It seems that President Obama had been wanting to make this speech for some time. Even out of government, I was getting frequent cues of an imminent address on the CT way ahead. One had apparently been penciled in for a date right before the Boston Marathon bombing but had been cancelled, no doubt much to the later relief of the president’s communications team.

  With Boston and the Tsarnaevs bundled up, the president finally went onstage at National Defense University to reflect and direct. It was a remarkable speech, long and deeply personal, more Hamlet than Patton (or even Marshall), but truly reflective of a personal ambivalence over the dilemmas we face.