Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  During the presidential campaign, John McCain and other Republicans had attempted to portray Obama as ill equipped to deal with the threat of international terrorism. But from the first days of his administration the new president was, in fact, extremely focused on escalating the covert US war against al Qaeda and expanding it far beyond Bush-era levels, particularly in Yemen.

  Two days after the election, when president-elect Obama received a global security briefing from director of national intelligence McConnell, he told Obama that, second to the al Qaeda presence in the tribal areas of Pakistan, an “immediate threat was al Qaeda in Yemen.” Two weeks later, when Obama met with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs, Obama was told that despite substantial US intelligence on the resurrection of al Qaeda in Yemen, “adequate plans” did not exist for confronting it. Less than a year into Obama’s presidency, a senior White House official publicly blamed the Bush administration for allowing al Qaeda to “regenerate” in Yemen and Somalia, “establishing new safe-havens that have grown over a period of years.”

  In the beginning of 2009, the Obama administration found itself in a challenging predicament with President Saleh. Obama had campaigned on a pledge to close Guantánamo and had signed an executive order mandating its closure. Almost half of the more than two hundred prisoners at the camp when Obama took office were from Yemen. Given President Saleh’s track record of prison breaks and false rehabilitation programs, the administration did not trust Saleh to handle the prisoners if they were repatriated. Although the Saudis had “rehabilitated” Shihri only to have him appear as a leader of AQAP, the White House favored transferring the Yemeni prisoners to Saudi custody.

  President Obama made John Brennan, his chief counterterrorism adviser, his point man on dealing with Yemen. Fluent in Arabic, Brennan had spent twenty-five years in the CIA, where he went from being an analyst and a spy to running the Agency’s operations in Saudi Arabia. In 1996, Brennan was station chief in Riyadh when the Khobar Towers were bombed and nineteen US military personnel were killed. Throughout most of the Bush years, he was at the epicenter of US intelligence operations and eventually headed up the National Counterterrorism Center, tracking intel on terrorists worldwide. Brennan joined the Obama transition team after the election, helping coordinate the new administration’s intelligence strategy. Obama had initially picked Brennan to be director of the CIA, but Brennan withdrew his name when it became clear that his past statements in support of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and extraordinary rendition of prisoners would make confirmation difficult. Instead, Brennan would serve as the deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, a position that did not require Senate confirmation. The position was made more powerful when Obama combined the portfolios of homeland security and national security and authorized Brennan to have “direct and immediate” access to the president.

  In his role as Obama’s Yemen point man, Brennan would find himself playing a dual role: negotiating access to Yemen’s territory for Special Operations and CIA operations, along with training for Yemeni units; and dealing with the issue of the Guantánamo detainees. Predictably, Saleh would link the two at times, using the prisoners as bargaining chips.

  In February 2009, after reaching agreements with tribal leaders, Saleh released 176 of the men taken into custody over the years on suspicion of being linked to al Qaeda. On March 15, in the southern historic fortified city of Shibam, four South Korean tourists were blown up as they posed for photographs near the UN World Heritage site. The next day, Brennan and the National Security Council director for counterterrorism, John Duncan, met with Saleh in Sana’a to try to persuade the Yemeni president to allow the United States to send Yemeni prisoners to Saudi Arabia. Brennan, according to a subsequent US diplomatic cable, was “repeatedly rebuffed.” Saleh demanded the prisoners be returned to Yemen and placed in a rehabilitation center that, Saleh suggested, should be funded by the United States and the Saudis. “We will offer the land in Aden, and you and the Saudis will provide the funding,” Saleh told them, adding that he thought $11 million in aid money should be enough to construct the facility. Brennan suggested that Saleh had “his hands full” dealing with al Qaeda and was too busy to run such a center. Saleh, according to the diplomatic cable, “appeared alternately dismissive, bored, and impatient during the 40-minute meeting.”

  At the meeting, Brennan delivered a letter from President Obama to Saleh. Yemen’s official Saba News Agency reported that the letter “deal[t] with cooperation between the two countries in security field and fighting terror” and “praised Yemen’s efforts in fighting terror and affirmed the United States’ support to Yemen.” A US diplomatic cable said the letter only addressed the Guantánamo situation. Before leaving Sana’a, Brennan told Saleh’s nephew, a senior counterterrorism official in Yemen, that he “would report to President Obama his disappointment that [Yemen] was being inflexible in dealing” with the Guantánamo issue. A few weeks after the meeting, Saleh told Newsweek, “We are not obedient soldiers of the United States. We don’t say just OK to everything that they ask us.”

  Colonel Patrick Lang first met Brennan when Brennan was assigned as a CIA analyst to Saudi Arabia. “I don’t think [Brennan]’s up to dealing with Saleh in terms of sheer craftiness and wiles,” Lang told me at the time, adding, the Yemenis “know how to deal with us.”

  WHILE BRENNAN AND OTHER CIVILIAN OFFICIALS haggled with Saleh over Guantánamo prisoners, the topic was far from the center of Washington’s counterterrorism policy. The Obama administration became consumed with the Afghanistan war strategy and would spend the next several months frequently debating how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan and how to deal with al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan.

  The CENTCOM commander, General Petraeus, pushed hard for Obama to appoint General Stanley McChrystal to run the Afghan War, knowing that McChrystal shared his passion for kinetic action and clandestine operations. Petraeus, meanwhile, focused on plans for the United States to intensify its direct action inside Yemen and elsewhere in his area of control. In April, in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Petraeus outlined the posture of CENTCOM, speaking in sweeping terms that were very much in line with the Bush-era view of the world as a battlefield. “Success against the extremist networks in the CENTCOM AOR [Area of Responsibility]—whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon, or elsewhere—requires all forces and means at our disposal employed in a strategic approach grounded in the principles of counterinsurgency,” Petraeus declared. “Our counter-terror efforts, which seek to dismantle the extremist networks and their leadership, often through the use of military force, are critical.”

  That month, Petraeus approved a plan developed with the US Embassy in Sana’a and the CIA and other intelligence agencies to expand US military action inside Yemen. Part of the plan involved special ops training for Yemeni forces, but it would also involve unilateral strikes against AQAP. Petraeus complained about what he saw as the “inability of the Yemeni government to secure and exercise control over all of its territory,” which he said “offers terrorist and insurgent groups in the region, particularly Al Qaeda, a safe haven in which to plan, organize, and support terrorist operations.” Petraeus said bluntly, “It is important that this problem be addressed, and CENTCOM is working to do that.” Although Petraeus paid lip service to the cooperation between the United States and Yemen, he was clear that the United States would strike in Yemen whenever it pleased. “When he was CENTCOM commander, then he was in a position to start to apply this ‘sacred doctrine’ to other places in the theater for which he was commander, and Yemen was one of those that was available,” recalled Colonel Lang. “And it’s very easy when you’re sitting in your headquarters to entertain thoughts like that.” Lang paused, then added: “Let it be done, you know, and it is done.”

  At the time, in the summer of 2009, General McChrystal had left JSOC and was serving as the director of operations for t
he Joint Chiefs of Staff. Although McChrystal would soon take over as commander of the Afghan War, he advised President Obama to transform the way JSOC was being used under the Bush administration and to utilize the unit more intimately in task forces run by combatant commanders rather than as a stand-alone force. Along with Petraeus, McChrystal pushed Obama to authorize the expansion of covert ops against al Qaeda to a dozen countries throughout the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia. The president gave the plan the green light. In the case of Yemen, that meant “direct actions” would fall under Petraeus’s command and be carried out by JSOC’s ninjas.

  On May 28, the CIA’s deputy director, Stephen Kappes, boarded a Yemeni Air Force helicopter in Sana’a and flew 120 miles south to the city of Taiz, where he was taken to one of President Saleh’s private residences. Saleh greeted him in a white dress shirt and black pants. Saleh had a small cut over his left eye from an accident he’d had in his pool about a week earlier at his palace in Sana’a. The focus of the forty-minute meeting was operations against AQAP and intelligence sharing between Yemen and the United States, but first Saleh confirmed for Kappes that he had decided to support the transfer of some of the Yemeni Guantánamo prisoners to Saudi Arabia—a move he had told Brennan he would not make. Kappes thanked Saleh on behalf of President Obama, and then Saleh repeated his request for an $11 million rehab center of his own, adding that the Bush administration had assured him he would get it. The two then moved on to the central issue for Kappes: AQAP. Kappes told Saleh that the United States was concerned that al Qaeda might try to assassinate Saleh. The Yemeni leader replied that he was also concerned about this possibility, adding that he had already broken up a plot to down one of his presidential planes on his recent trip to Aden. When Kappes told Saleh that the Obama administration was intent on destroying al Qaeda worldwide, Saleh replied, “I hope this campaign continues and succeeds. We’re doing the same here. Our position is unshakable.”

  What stood out most to Kappes from the meeting was Saleh’s “decision to reverse himself and characterize AQAP as the most serious threat facing Yemen.” Kappes and his entourage observed that Saleh’s prime focus on AQAP versus the Houthis or the southern secessionists “was almost certainly taken with his [US government] interlocutors in mind” and “meant to elicit the necessary level of political, economic and military assistance to forestall Yemen’s collapse, and the negative effects it would have on regional stability and security.” During his meeting with Kappes, Saleh also pushed his line that the Houthis in the north were being backed by Iran and Hezbollah. Unbeknownst to Kappes, Saleh was laying the groundwork for another offensive in the north. The two men agreed that their intelligence cooperation was moving ahead smoothly and would only grow stronger.

  ON JUNE 1, 2009, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a US citizen, carried out a drive-by shooting outside a US military recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas. He killed Private William Long and wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula as they stood in front of the center. Born Carlos Bledsoe, Muhammad, a convert to Islam, had traveled in 2007 to Yemen, where he would marry and remain for a year and a half. While in Yemen, he was arrested by local authorities after he was stopped at a checkpoint carrying a fake Somali passport and weapons manuals as well as literature by Anwar Awlaki. Muhammad subsequently spent four months in prison, where his lawyer says he was tortured by Yemeni authorities and radicalized by other prisoners. “If you ever get out of this godforsaken place, we’ll hound you ’til the day you die,” a visiting FBI agent told Muhammad during a visit with him in the Yemeni prison, according to his lawyer.

  Eventually, the US government persuaded the Yemeni government to deport Muhammad to the United States. Once on US soil, he was investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force but was not taken into custody. Muhammad told police officials who interrogated him that he was motivated by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  After the drive-by shooting in Arkansas, as Muhammad’s lawyer prepared his defense, Muhammad sent a handwritten letter to the judge in the case, announcing his intent to plead guilty. Muhammad said the shooting was “a jihadi attack on infidel forces,” declared his allegiance to Wuhayshi and AQAP and proclaimed, “I wasn’t insane or post traumatic nor was I forced to do this act. Which I believe and it is justified according to Islamic laws and the Islamic religion jihad—to fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.” Whether Muhammad had actual ties to AQAP may never be known. His father suggested his son was brainwashed and “might be trying to link himself to Al Qaeda because he believes it will lead to his execution and make him a martyr.” Whether it was an AQAP attack or not would soon become irrelevant, though, as other deadly incidents contributed to a perception that the group was intent on striking in the United States.

  Shortly before the recruiting center shooting, former vice president Dick Cheney launched a scathing public assault on President Obama’s counterterrorism policies. In a speech before the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, Cheney blasted Obama’s formal halting of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and celebrated congressional defunding of Obama’s attempt to transfer Guantánamo detainees to US soil, a move that effectively blocked the closing of the prison. Cheney called Obama’s counterterrorism policies, particularly the banning of torture, “recklessness cloaked in righteousness,” charging they “would make the American people less safe.”

  While Cheney attacked in public, behind the scenes the Obama administration was preparing to launch a far more expansive and sophisticated counterterrorism campaign than that waged by Cheney and his former boss, particularly when it came to Yemen, drawing on the controversial Bush doctrine that declared the world a battlefield. Obama “doubled down on Bush policy,” said Joshua Foust, who worked as a Yemen analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the first half of the Obama administration. Shortly after he left the DIA, in early 2011, Foust told me that Obama’s approach to Yemen was “heavily militarized, heavily focused on directly neutralizing the threat, instead of kind of draining the swamp.”

  From the start, the men who would be in charge of “neutralizing the threat” were, in fact, two of the major players in the Bush administration’s war team. While General McChrystal coordinated the escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Petraeus would oversee the “small wars” in other areas of CENTCOM, particularly in Yemen, in coordination with McChrystal’s successor at JSOC, Admiral McRaven. Under the task force structure, JSOC was designated as the lead force for covert action inside Yemen. For many JSOC operators, Yemen seemed more relevant to their skill set than Afghanistan, where al Qaeda had been largely wiped out or forced on the run. “These guys are scalpels. They don’t like being used as sledgehammers,” the former aide to the special operations commander told me. “In Afghanistan they were used as sledgehammers, chasing down Taliban goatherders. In Yemen, they could be scalpels again, knocking off actual al Qaeda.” He added that: Special Operations “wants to own this shit like they did in Central America in the ’80s. They don’t want Jamba Juice, COIN [counterinsurgency] and ‘nation building.’”

  Following Kappes’s visit with Saleh in May, as part of the coordinated CIA-military-JSOC-State Department plan on Yemen, Hillary Clinton authorized the US ambassador in Yemen, Stephen Seche, to negotiate with Saleh for the United States to be able to fly drones and US helicopters over Yemen’s territorial waters at will. Seche was directly told not to put anything on paper and to discuss the proposal only in person. The official reason Seche was to give Saleh for the flyover rights was that CENTCOM needed access for its drones to “interdict the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.” Among Seche’s talking points with Saleh was US intelligence purportedly showing that a “significant volume of arms shipments to Hamas make the short 24-hour transit across the Red Sea from Yemen to Sudan.” Another was that the United States had discovered that “a weapons smuggling network originating in Yemen is supplying weapons to individuals in Africa who are delivering them to v
arious entities there, potentially including al-Qa’ida associated terrorist groups.” Yemen’s cooperation with the drones and helicopters “would greatly enhance CENTCOM’s ability to gain the intelligence required to identify and track” the shipments. Although part of the US intent in brokering this agreement may well have been to track weapons smuggling, its timing suggests it was a cover story.

  General Petraeus flew to Yemen on July 26, 2009, to continue laying the groundwork for the joint CIA-military plan to escalate targeting of AQAP. The general brought a gift for Saleh—official confirmation that Obama was increasing military aid to Yemen. In return, Petraeus pressed Saleh to go directly after al Qaeda. For both Saleh and the United States, it was important that Yemen appear to be fighting AQAP on its own and to conceal the extent of US involvement, which was expanding by the day.

  A week after the meeting with Petraeus, Saleh deployed his nephew, Ammar Muhammad Abdullah Saleh—a senior commander of the National Security Bureau—to Marib, a hotbed of al Qaeda activity. Ammar’s mission was to take down a suspected al Qaeda cell in an operation intended to show Washington that Saleh was serious. It was a disaster. Despite Ammar’s negotiations with local tribal leaders on the terms of the assault, the Yemeni counterterrorism units botched it. Instead of shelling the al Qaeda safe house, they hit a tribal compound, sparking a gun battle in which tribal fighters actually joined with AQAP in attacking the government forces. A military supply truck got lost and was captured by al Qaeda operatives. In the end, Saleh’s forces lost five tanks and several troops, and seven of their soldiers were taken prisoner. AQAP quickly capitalized on the debacle, naming it the “Battle of Marib” and posting a video online that featured the captured soldiers. Although the operation was a colossal failure, it was also useful for the United States and Saleh because it was a very public show that the Yemeni government was fighting AQAP, thus helping to cloak US actions in Yemen.