National Security Intelligence

by Loch K. Johnson

  In an update on civilian casualties, the Obama administration told NBC News in 2016 that “only” 100 civilians had died in the nearly 500 U.S. drone strikes since 2009. Later that same year, the Administration clarified the numbers: between 64 and 116 civilians had died in 473 drone strikes. Independent groups countered, however, that the actual number of civilian deaths exceeded 1,000.26

  At the time of writing, drone assassination initiatives are vetted by lawyers on the NSC working with their counterparts in the Intelligence Community. The initial step is a targeting recommendation prepared by attorneys in the IC or the Department of Defense. Next, the NSC Deputies Committee (consisting of those second in command at the recommending agency or the DoD), gives the proposal a thorough scrub, before passing it along to the DNI, D/CIA, and the SecDef on the Principals Committee. If the potential target is a U.S. citizen, the President must sign off as well and the congressional oversight committees are informed. In extraordinary cases, these steps can be short-circuited with the President alone providing authorization for the kill. Beyond these tightened procedures, the Obama Administration redoubled its efforts to avoid casualties among innocent civilians by improving intelligence reconnaissance before a drone attack takes place. Moreover, the guidelines fashioned by the Obama Administration require that drone assassinations can go forward only if the targeted individual poses a grave threat to the United States, and if there is a “near certainty” that no civilian casualties will result from the attack.

  Several top officials at the Agency began to express their view publicly that covert action – and especially drone attacks – had become too dominant in the CIA's global operations, with intelligence analysts focused more and more on establishing GPS drone-targeting coordinates rather than on the production of assessments about world affairs.27 At Langley, CIA Director John O. Brennan (who had served as an analyst throughout his career at the Agency) urged the restoration of traditional analysis as the top priority in the Agency's portfolio of responsibilities, with the CIA involved in drone strikes only in limited instances. In its final years, the Obama Administration started to shift more of the responsibility for counterterrorist drone attacks to the Pentagon and away from the CIA, in part because Brennan strongly opposed the idea of the Agency as a killing machine rather than an organization engaged chiefly in collection-and-analysis.

  Earlier, during the Clinton Administration, the President called off two counterterrorist attacks by cruise missiles just as they were ready for firing from U.S. destroyers in the Red Sea against the Al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. In one instance, Bin Laden was surrounded by his wives and children in a village and, in another, by princes from the United Arab Emirates (UAE, an American ally – of sorts) on a bird-hunting expedition. On another occasion, the missiles were fired from a U.S. Navy cruiser in the Red Sea at a suspected Al Qaeda gathering in the desert near the town of Khost in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, but Bin Laden had already departed before the warheads struck the encampment. He continued to evade U.S. assassination attempts, lying low somewhere (experts believed) in the mountains of Pakistan. In 2011, he was finally discovered and a U.S. Special Forces team shot him dead in a walled compound in the city of Abbottabad, just thirty-five miles from the capital Islamabad.

  Exactly who should be on the “kill” list has been a controversial subject. Originally, the Patriot Act of 2001 stipulated that only those enemies involved in the 9/11 attacks were legitimate targets for retaliation. Since then – and without further legislative guidelines – the target list has widened. For example, a U.S. citizen hiding out in Yemen by the name of Anwar al-Awlaki was placed for consideration on an assassination list generated by the Obama Administration, even though it was never demonstrated to the public that he had actually been involved in plots against the United States. If he had been, al-Awlaki could be considered a legitimate target; however, if he had limited himself to making speeches against the United States, he would have been just one of hundreds of radicals in the Middle East and Southwest Asia who have advocated jihad against the West in recent years. Behind closed doors, attorneys in the Obama Administration eventually decided that Awlaki had participated sufficiently in terrorist activities to qualify as a legitimate assassination target. President Obama signed the death warrant and the Yemeni iman was blown to pieces by Hellfire missiles in 2011. He was not the first U.S. citizen to be killed by CIA drones. In 2002, a Predator fired a missile at an automobile in a Yemeni desert that carried six passengers suspected to be Al Qaeda members. All six were incinerated. One turned out to be an American citizen. Each of these events, and there have been others (including, by accident, Awlaki's son), raises serious questions about the relationship between due process and assassination.

  At present, the procedures for developing assassination lists lack sufficient clarity and oversight. Reportedly, the decision to kill requires the approval of the U.S. ambassador to the target country, as well as the CIA chief of station, the DO director, and the D/CIA. As noted earlier, if the target is an American citizen, like Al-Awlaki, attorneys in the Justice Department and the President must also approve. Further, at least a few of the members of the congressional Intelligence Committees are briefed on the targeting, and some of their staff are invited to the White House Situation Room to follow the videos of the drone attacks. The idea is to demonstrate to overseers the great care that the Administration takes to avoid civilian casualties.

  Despite some efforts to reassure congressional supervisors that the IC is doing its best to act prudently, the secret agencies have often drawn the ire of lawmakers who have viewed some post-9/11 spy operations as excessive. Examples include the use of harsh interrogation methods during the second Bush Administration, as well as the use of extraordinary renditions (subjects explored in more depth in Chapter 5). With these excesses in mind, critics have argued that a more formal congressional review should take place when it comes to drone assassinations. Critics have suggested that the courts should be part of this decision-making process, too. A new court could be established to issue warrants for assassinations. A precedent for special intelligence courts is the judicial panel set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, where executive officials are supposed to seek warrants for telephone wiretaps against American citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.28

  In 2014 and after, the CIA flew no drone missile attacks against the ISIS target in Iraq and Syria, leaving this terrain to the Pentagon's UAV pilots. A new debate began in Washington about the CIA's remit. Should it step out of the Murder, Inc. business, handing over drone warfare exclusively to the Pentagon? A group of vocal dissenters opposed the views of the President and the D/CIA on shelving the Agency's drone capabilities. For one thing, argued top leaders on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Chairman Richard Burr (R, N. Carolina) and Ranking Minority Member Dianne Feinstein (D, California), sometimes the Pentagon was too slow in sending drones against known terrorist targets in Syria and Iraq, leading to “missed opportunities” once the CIA had spotted ISIS fighters. The CIA's drone commanders should be allowed to pull the trigger in those circumstances, they argued. Hiding behind this reasoning were two even stronger concerns on Capitol Hill. First, SSCI's leaders believed that the CIA was subject to greater congressional accountability than the Pentagon, because of the Hughes–Ryan reporting procedures, and therefore should remain in charge of most drone attacks – certainly those outside the official theaters of war. Those theaters continued to include Afghanistan and, with the spilling of ISIS terrorism from Syria eastward, Iraq as well – and, increasingly, Libya. Second, and unstated, the SSCI leaders (and those on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, or HPSCI, too) want to keep their jurisdiction over CIA drones, because it provided them with a heady closeness to the high circles of policymaking in the White House. Still others maintained, however, that Pentagon drone attacks were more accountable because they did not have to be clothed in as
much secrecy as CIA operations.

  Even when the United States has decided to “neutralize” (kill) an adversary overseas, the task has proved difficult to carry out. Castro reportedly survived thirty-two attempts on his life attempted by the Agency.29 Efforts to take out the warlord Mohamed Ali Farrah Aidid of Somalia failed during America's brief involvement in fighting on the African Horn in 1993; Saddam Hussein proved impossible to find during the 1990s; and Bin Laden evaded detection for almost a decade after 9/11. Anwar al-Awlaki also proved elusive for years. Dictators are paranoid, well guarded, and elusive, as are high-ranking members of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their terrorist brethren. Most troubling of all is the thought that assassinations carried out by the United States may encourage others to target, in return, the American President and other leaders in Washington while they travel overseas.

  The ebb and flow of covert action

  Although out of favor with some administrations in the United States, others have spent enormous sums of money on covert action. Support for these operations during the Cold War accelerated from the very beginning of the CIA's history, moving from non-existence in 1947 to high prominence during the Korean War in 1950–53, falling back to much lower levels until a new spurt of major funding during the height of the Vietnam War in 1968–71, and then declining again for a decade before a dramatic resurgence during the Reagan years (see Figure 3.2 above). The war in Korea boosted the covert action mission in the Agency's infant days. As Ranelagh reports, funding “increased sixteenfold between January 1951 and January 1953,” and personnel assigned to the mission doubled.30 During this period, the budget for CA “skyrocketed,” according to the Church Committee.31 Successes in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) encouraged the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations to rely further on the Covert Action Staff to achieve American foreign policy victories. Daugherty notes that the outcomes in Iran and Guatemala “left in their wake an attitude of hubris” at Langley and throughout the Eisenhower Administration's national security apparatus.32

  Even the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 created only a small and short-lived blip of skepticism about the use of covert action, before the Kennedy Administration turned again to the Agency for assistance in the resolution of international headaches. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the DO and its allied mercenaries abroad waged a hidden World War III against communist forces – most notably in the jungles of Indochina. At times, covert actions absorbed up to 60 percent of the CIA's annual budget.33

  A precipitous slide downward for the “quiet option” occurred in the early 1970s, induced by a souring of the war in Vietnam, government spending cuts pursued by the Nixon Administration, tentative overtures of détente with the Soviet Union, and a domestic spy scandal in 1975 that was accompanied by revelations about CIA assassination plots and attacks against the democratically elected government of Chile (the Allende regime). The covert action revelations, especially from the Church Committee, raised doubts among the American people and their representatives in Congress about the ethics and the value of special activities. Public reaction brought covert action “to a screeching halt,” recalls a senior CIA official.34 Interest in the “third option” (yet another euphemism for covert action) would resume during the presidency of Jimmy Carter – ironically, since he had campaigned in 1976 against the use of CA “dirty tricks” by the Agency. The most important catalyst for Carter's turn-around was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The United States would have to fight back, the President decided (with strong nudging from his hawkish National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski); and secret CIA operations would have to be the instrument of retaliation – since it would be mutually suicidal to initiate an overt war with the USSR, with its thousands of nuclear warheads atop ICBMs that could streak across the vast expanse of the northern polar region to strike cities from Los Angeles to New York City in less than a half-hour.

  For proponents of covert action, the next decade – the 1980s – represented a Golden Age. The Reagan Administration recorded the historical high point of U.S. support for secret interventions abroad since 1947, although the current emphasis on covert operations – especially paramilitary activities with UAVs in the Middle East and Southwest Asia – surpassed this record during the Obama years. The 1980s were also the only time major attention was given to covert action by the United States without the nation's accompanying involvement in a major overt war. The more normal pattern is for covert action high points to occur within the framework of support to military operations (SMOs) during significant U.S. military interventions abroad: Korea, Vietnam, and, more recently, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the struggle against ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Taliban insurgents. The Reagan years demonstrated that, if an administration so chooses, it could commit to high levels of emphasis on covert action even during peacetime.

  Thus, during the 1980s, the CIA's Operations Directorate would become the chief instrument for advancing the ideologically driven “Reagan Doctrine” of opposing communist-backed wars of liberation in the developing world, from El Salvador to Cambodia. The primary targets for the Reagan Administration were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Red Army in Afghanistan. Funding poured into both operations, illegally so in the case of Nicaragua (and thus the Iran–contra scandal). The Nicaraguan intervention cast upon the CIA the darkest mark in the history of its use of covert action – worse even than the débâcle at the Bay of Pigs. The Iran–contra affair represented a fundamental assault on the U.S. Constitution, as the Reagan Administration (specifically, the NSC staff and elements of the CIA) attempted to bypass Congress and raise funds privately to advance covert actions against Nicaragua, even though these operations were prohibited by Congress (the Boland Amendments). In addition to its violations of U.S. law, the scheme also failed to topple the Sandinistas, whose leader, Daniel Ortega, continued to rule Nicaragua off and on in competitive elections (and is once again the President of Nicaragua today). In contrast, the Afghan intervention followed proper authorization, with appropriate adherence to the Hughes–Ryan CA reporting procedures at home; moreover, this use of covert action succeeded in helping to drive the Soviet military out of Afghanistan.

  President George H. W. Bush has noted that he found covert action useful on occasion, but during his years in the White House (1989–92) the funding for special activities went into sharp decline, leveling out at around just below 1 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget – far below its heyday during the Reagan years.35 From a place of prominence in the U.S.-led anti-communist crusades of the Cold War, the covert action mission had fallen into a state of near disregard by 1991. A senior DO officer looks back on these days ruefully:

  I feel that a lot more could be done in the broad area of covert action in support of policy with the proper resources allocated to the mission. I am not thinking in terms of going back to the days when CA was 60 percent of the CIA budget; but I do feel that less than 1 percent is below minimum. It is a mission that is legally and properly assigned to the Agency and, once we can get better understanding of it and clear up some of the controversies that surround it, I think it should have additional people if we are to carry out effectively what is the mission assigned to us by the president.36

  During the Clinton Administration, DCI John Deutch observed: “Since the public controversies of the eighties over Iran–contra and activities in Central America, we have greatly reduced our capability to engage in covert action.”37 During Deutch's tenure (1995–96), funding for covert action turned modestly upward, as a means for aiding new democratic regimes against hostile forces (as in Haiti, for instance), as well as for thwarting the machinations of terrorists, drug dealers, and weapons proliferators (the latter rising to the level of the top 1A threat-assessment target during the Clinton years). Covert actions became more narrowly tailored – less global in nature – than during the Cold War.

  With the election of George W. Bush, covert action at first remained at a modest level – until the 9/11 attacks. Then, with thr
ee wars fought simultaneously by the United States (in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as against global terrorism), covert action underwent a renaissance, directed against targets chiefly in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. This rejuvenation brought the use, and the status, of covert action up to levels comparable to the earlier historical high points: those operations that had supported the war in Korea and the Reagan Administration's use of the third option in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. President Barack Obama first maintained the level of interest in covert action established by the second Bush Administration, then began to use this approach much more extensively in Afghanistan and Pakistan, reaching the record highs mentioned earlier (in terms of an administration's emphasis on CA). In 2011, President Obama also authorized covert action support to rebels fighting against the Qaddafi regime in Libya and, when that regime collapsed and Qaddafi was killed, against the new ISIS insurgency in this troubled North African nation.