Intel Wars

by Matthew M. Aid

  In April 2009, to no one’s surprise, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, broke the Swat cease-fire agreement that his representatives had signed just two months earlier and resumed hostilities. In a matter of forty-eight hours the Taliban overwhelmed the few remaining Pakistani Army and paramilitary posts in the district and quickly advanced eastward against virtually no resistance into the neighboring Buner District, reaching a point only sixty miles from Islamabad. At the same time, the CIA station in Islamabad and an allied foreign intelligence service reported that Pakistani Taliban militants had been detected moving into the city of Karachi and other cities in the populous Punjabi heartland of Pakistan, where they quickly linked up with other militant groups opposed to the Pakistani government. The office of the director of national intelligence sent to the White House a classified spot report that essentially concluded that the security situation in Pakistan was deteriorating rapidly and that the Pakistani government and military had now lost control of large parts of the northern part of the country.

  As the Taliban swept south toward Islamabad, Obama administration officials openly voiced their frustration at the inability or unwillingness of the Pakistani government and military to aggressively confront the Pakistani Taliban militants. The weak and indecisive Zardari government seemed to be mired in political bickering, and the Pakistani Army would not budge from its fixation on India. Testifying before Congress on April 1, 2009, the commander of U.S. Central Command, General David H. Petraeus, issued a less-than-subtle warning to the Pakistani government that the Pakistani Taliban extremists, if not checked, “could literally take down their state.”

  As the Taliban juggernaut rolled southward, concern spread in Washington about the safety of Pakistan’s arsenal of seventy to ninety nuclear weapons. In the minds of some U.S. intelligence officials, a nightmare scenario was beginning to take shape in which Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of the Taliban unless the military situation in the north of the country was somehow reversed.

  One senior American official recalled that in late April 2009, the CIA station in Islamabad reported to Washington that there were no discernible signs that the Pakistani military was taking any steps to beef up security at its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile storage facilities. One of the station’s agents inside the Pakistani military reported that there had been no appreciable change in the security measures at the Pakistani Air Force’s major nuclear weapons storage sites at Masroor Air Base on the outskirts of the city of Karachi, or at Mushaf Air Base outside the city of Sargodha, 170 kilometers northwest of the city of Lahore. Likewise, there were no signs that the Pakistani Army had increased the alert status of its force of nuclear-armed M-11 ballistic missiles, which were stored in reinforced bunkers at the huge Kirana Hills weapons depot south of Sargodha.

  These intelligence reports from Pakistan raised alarm bells in Washington. In early May 2009, CIA director Leon Panetta ordered the CIA station chief in Islamabad to step up surveillance of all Pakistani nuclear weapons storage depots, as well as pump his sources inside the Pakistani military for any information about what they were doing to ensure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal did not fall into the hands of the Pakistani Taliban or other Muslim extremist groups inside Pakistan. At the same time, U.S. Air Force and Navy planners began contingency planning for air and cruise missile strikes against the Pakistani nuclear weapons storage depots in case these sites were taken over by Muslim extremist groups.

  Just as the Taliban juggernaut appeared to be on the verge of rolling unopposed into Islamabad, it suddenly stopped in late May. Realizing how dire the situation was, Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Kayani had ordered an entire army corps sent posthaste from its garrisons along the Indian border to Swat. An attack by 22,000 Pakistani Army troops backed by hundreds of tanks sent the lightly armed Taliban fighters reeling back toward their mountain redoubts. By the end of June the Swat Valley had been retaken largely without a fight, with the Taliban’s top commander, Maulana Fazlullah, opting to return to the mountains in order to fight again another day.

  The fighting in the FATA during the summer and fall of 2009 between the Pakistani military and the Taliban was remarkable from an intelligence perspective, for a number of reasons. In June 2009, the Pakistani military for the first time allowed U.S. Air Force drones based in Afghanistan to cross the border and fly photo reconnaissance missions over the Pakistani Taliban strongholds in the FATA and the North-West Frontier Province; and the CIA was authorized for the first time to use Predator and Reaper unmanned drones to attack Pakistani Taliban targets not just in the FATA but also in the area to the east around the city of Peshawar.

  With the secret and entirely deniable blessing of the Pakistani government and military, the CIA immediately ratcheted up the number of drone attacks in the FATA, conducting fifty-three missile strikes in the FATA in 2009 as compared with only thirty-six the previous year. CIA officials were jubilant when one of their drones on August 5, 2009, killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, in his house in the village of Zanghara in South Waziristan. But the CIA’s jubilation was short-lived.

  Not everyone in the U.S. government was as satisfied with the results of the drone strikes as the CIA. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told President Obama that the CIA’s unmanned drone strikes were not the war-winners that many CIA officials said they were. According to Clinton, no matter how many al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban commanders and fighters the drones killed, the militants would, as they have done for the past decade, just replace the losses within days. In State’s view, the only way that al Qaeda would ever be defeated was if the Pakistani military could somehow be coerced or induced into going into the FATA and cleansing the place with, as one of the secretary of state’s advisers put it, “fire and sword.”

  CIA officials thought that the State Department was being overly cautious, with one agency official saying that “State was just doing what they always do—covering their ass.” According to the CIA officials, intercepted cell phone calls confirmed that the drone strikes were taking a terrible toll on al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.

  There was a serious downside to the missile strikes, however. For their part, Pakistani military officials believed that the drone attacks had proved to be an invaluable recruiting tool for the Pakistani Taliban, with a surreptitiously taken videotape made by Pakistani military intelligence showing hundreds of enraged Waziri tribesmen volunteering to join the Taliban after several particularly bloody CIA drone attacks in North Waziristan in December 2009. According to Wing Commander Irfan Ahmad, a U.S.-educated Pakistani Air Force officer who has been intimately involved in the fight against the Taliban in northern Pakistan since 2004, “It appears that the drone attacks have increased [the] militants’ motivation for terrorist activity.”

  On December 30, 2009, a Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who had been recruited by the Jordanian intelligence service while in prison to spy on al Qaeda in Pakistan, detonated a vest containing high explosives inside the heavily guarded CIA compound at Forward Operating Base Chapman outside the city of Khost in southeastern Afghanistan, killing seven CIA officers or contractors and a Jordanian intelligence officer who was Balawi’s case officer. The most prominent casualty was the CIA base chief, Jennifer Lynne Matthews, a forty-five-year-old divorced mother of three from Fredericksburg, Maryland, who had served twenty years in the CIA, most of them as an analyst in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at Langley, Virginia. The Pakistani Taliban immediately took credit for the attack, stating that the Khost attack was in retaliation for the CIA’s killing of Baitullah Mehsud in August.

  The CIA’s retaliation for the Khost suicide bombing proved to be embarrassing. On January 14, 2010, spokesmen for the U.S. and Pakistani governments gleefully announced that a missile fired from a CIA drone had destroyed a compound at Pasalkot in North Waziristan, killing Hakimullah Mehsud, who had succeeded Baitullah Mehsud as head
of the Pakistani Taliban. The Taliban’s spokesman vehemently denied that Mehsud had been killed, but officials in Washington and Islamabad dismissed his claim as nothing but empty rhetoric. It turns out it wasn’t. Four months later, on May 3, the Taliban proved everyone wrong when they released to selected reporters in Islamabad a videotape showing that Hakimullah Mehsud was indeed very much alive and well.

  By December 2009, the U.S. intelligence community believed that Pakistan had been saved, but only just barely. Over 11,500 civilians, soldiers, policemen, and terrorists had been killed in 2009, bringing the death toll to more than 25,000 dead since figures started being compiled by the Pakistani government in 2003.

  In Washington, the victory over the Taliban was more bitter than sweet. As soon as the Pakistani Taliban militants had been beaten back from the gates of Islamabad, the Pakistani military immediately reneged on its promise to Washington to break its ties with Mullah Omar’s Taliban forces and the other terrorist groups in Pakistan.

  According to interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, this was because the Pakistani military and ISI had concluded that the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan was going to pull out of the country before the Taliban could be defeated, leaving in Kabul a government hostile to Pakistan and backed by its arch-enemy, India. According to a cable from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, “Fear that the ISAF mission in Afghanistan will end without the establishment of a non-Taliban, [Pashtun]-led government friendly to Pakistan adds to the Pakistani establishment’s determination not to cut its ties irrevocably to the Afghan Taliban.”

  An angry Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent a harshly worded cable to all American embassies in the Persian Gulf in December 2009 that essentially charged Pakistan with continuing to aid and abet terrorist groups within its borders. According to the cable, “Although Pakistani senior officials have publicly disavowed support for these [terrorist] groups, some officials from the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations.”

  Even more difficult to swallow were the end-of-year intelligence assessments, which showed that the Pakistani Taliban had not been defeated in 2009. The Pakistani military had mounted nearly a half-dozen halfhearted offensives against the al Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban fighters in the FATA during the summer and fall of 2009, which while achieving some modest gains failed in their goal to clear the region of militants. When the operations were over, the Pakistani forces returned to their garrisons for the winter and surrendered all of the gains they had made back to the Taliban. But what really angered American diplomats and intelligence officials was that the Pakistani army had refused to go after any of the Taliban factions based in the FATA who were on its payroll, such as the ISI’s longtime Taliban client, the Haqqani Network.

  In the opinion of the U.S. intelligence community’s experts on Pakistan, such as the national intelligence officer for South Asia, Neil H. Joeck, the biggest loser of 2009 was the government of Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari, whose authority in December 2009 was in free fall in the face of mounting internal opposition to his pro-Washington policies from the Pakistani political elite and the military.

  Clandestine intelligence reporting in 2009 and early 2010 revealed that President Zardari had on a number of occasions pressed army chief of staff General Kayani to intensify his military’s efforts against the Taliban in northern Pakistan, only to be rebuffed each time because Kayani still refused to budge from his firmly held belief, which was shared by the entire Pakistani general staff and the ISI, that India remained the principal external threat to Pakistan’s national security, not the Taliban.

  In a confrontational November 20, 2009, meeting in Islamabad, CIA director Leon Panetta told ISI director General Ahmad Shuja Pasha that his agency had to do more to combat the presence of Taliban and al Qaeda militants in the FATA, and live up to its promise to cease its covert support of all three of the Afghan Taliban factions that continued to operate from their sanctuaries in northern Pakistan. Panetta also told General Pasha that his agency’s overt harassment of CIA operatives based in Pakistan had to stop; otherwise, the CIA chief said, “there would be repercussions.”

  But the Pakistani military and the ISI felt that they were being deliberately manipulated by Washington. Shortly before Christmas 2009, a senior Pakistani military official told a CIA officer in Islamabad that he thought that Washington was deliberately “hyping” the threat from al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban in order to get what it wanted from Islamabad. Despite the terrible events of the past year, the general still honestly believed that India was the top threat to Pakistan’s national security, not the Pakistani Taliban or al Qaeda. “I could not believe what I was hearing,” the CIA official said. “How could this guy be so blind after everything that had just happened?”

  As we shall see in chapter 7, this exchange proved to be an ominous portent of things to come.

  CHAPTER 5

  We Have to Kill Them All

  Scenes from the Global War on Terrorism

  Too long a sacrifice

  Can make a stone of the heart.

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, “EASTER, 1916”

  British prime minister Winston Churchill is reputed to have said more than sixty years ago, “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Churchill was, of course, referring to the unconventional and often brutal tactics that the badly outnumbered British forces felt compelled to use against the Germans during the darkest days of World War II.

  The metaphor may be more than sixty years old, but it remains apt today when describing the decade-long secret war that the U.S. intelligence community and its allies around the world have waged against not only al Qaeda in Pakistan but the dozens of other foreign terrorist groups of every size, shape, and color around the world.

  In the days after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration made a resolution, which was codified in a top secret directive—National Security Presidential Directive 9, “Combating Terrorism”—that as a matter of the greatest urgency it was necessary to destroy al Qaeda and all of its allies by any means necessary because of the clear and present danger they posed to U.S. national security and, according to a declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff document, “our way of life as a free and open society.”

  This document was written in stark terms that reduced a very complex global problem down to a simple “us versus them” paradigm in which the overarching doctrine was “we must kill them before they kill us.” It was remarkably similar in tenor and tone to a classified directive written almost thirty years earlier in the aftermath of the September 1972 massacre of eleven Israeli athletes and a German policeman at the Munich Olympic Games, wherein the Israeli cabinet ordered the Mossad to wipe out the Palestinian Black September terrorist group because of the danger that it posed to the Israeli state.

  Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has waged a secret battle beyond America’s borders against a host of foreign terrorist organizations, conducted almost entirely out of view of the American public. The fight has been both remorseless and pitiless, with no quarter asked for or given on either side.

  Since entering office in 2009, the Obama administration has continued the policy initiated during the Bush administration of killing al Qaeda leaders and fighters whenever and wherever they are found. The widely held sentiment inside the U.S. intelligence community remains that the only sure way to ensure that there will be no more 9/11s is, as one current senior administration official starkly put it in a 2009 interview, “We have to kill them all, every last one of them.”

  The U.S. intelligence community’s fight against al Qaeda and the hundreds of other foreign terrorist groups around the world is run from the National Counterterrorism Center, which is located in Building LX-1 next to the director of national intelligence’s office at Liberty Crossing in northern Virginia.

&nb
sp; The chief of the NCTC from June 2008 until his retirement in July 2011, Michael E. Leiter, had an unusual pedigree for the nation’s top terrorist hunter. He spent six years flying navy electronic warfare aircraft off the decks of aircraft carriers before graduating from Harvard Law School in 2000 magna cum laude, where he was also the editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Leiter spent the next three years (2002–5) as a federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Virginia, before getting his first exposure to the intelligence world when he was chosen to be deputy general counsel of the Robb-Silberman Commission, which examined why the U.S. intelligence community failed so miserably in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That led to a one-year stint as deputy chief of staff for the first director of national intelligence, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, before moving over to take command of NCTC in 2007. When the Obama administration came into office in 2009, Leiter was asked to stay on at his post because of the respect that he had garnered within the intelligence community.

  Leiter may have had the respect of his peers in the intelligence community, but the organization he commanded was viewed by many as troubled. The NCTC was yet another example of the poor compromises that often come out of the U.S. intelligence community’s convoluted decision-making process. Its predecessor, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), had been created on May 11, 2003, to be the U.S. intelligence community’s one-stop-shopping source for all intelligence information, both raw and evaluated, about domestic and foreign terrorist groups and their activities. The only way such a clearinghouse was going to work cohesively was if it brought together under one single roof the more than one dozen counterterrorism units that then existed within the U.S. intelligence community. But when it came time to consolidate, all sixteen American agencies refused to give up the counterterrorism units that they had lavished so much time and money on since 9/11.