Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  “Certainly Shaye’s reports were an embarrassment for the US and Yemeni government, because at a time when both governments were seeking and failing to kill key leaders within AQAP, this single journalist with his camera and computer was able to locate these same leaders and interview them,” Johnsen told me. “There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that Abdulelah was anything other than a journalist attempting to do his job, and it remains unclear why the US or Yemeni government refuse to present the evidence they claim to possess.”

  Shaye staged a brief hunger strike to protest his imprisonment, ending it after his family expressed concerns about his deteriorating health. While international media organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, called for Shaye’s release, his case received scant attention in the United States. Yemeni journalists, human rights activists and lawyers charged that he remained in jail at the request of the White House. State Department spokesperson Beth Gosselin told me the United States wanted him kept behind bars. “We remain concerned about Shaye’s potential release due to his association with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. We stand by the president’s comments.” When asked whether the US government should present evidence to support its claims about Shaye’s association with AQAP, Gosselin told me, “That is all we have to say about this case.”

  When Times of London journalist Iona Craig questioned the US ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, about Shaye’s case, she said Feierstein laughed at the question before answering. “Shaye is in jail because he was facilitating al Qaeda and its planning for attacks on Americans and therefore we have a very direct interest in his case and his imprisonment,” Feierstein said. When Craig mentioned the shock waves it had sent through the journalism community in Yemen, Feierstein replied, “This isn’t anything to do with journalism, it is to do with the fact that he was assisting AQAP and if they [Yemeni journalists] are not doing that they don’t have anything to worry about from us.”

  For many journalists in Yemen, the publicly available “facts” about how Shaye was “assisting” AQAP indicated that simply interviewing al Qaeda–associated figures, or reporting on civilian deaths caused by US strikes, was a crime in the view of the US government. “I think the worst thing about the whole case is that not only is an independent journalist being held in proxy detention by the US,” said Craig, “but that they’ve successfully [intimidated] other Yemeni journalists investigating air strikes against civilians and, most importantly, holding their own government to account. Shaye did both of those things.” She added, “With the huge increase in government air strikes and US drone attacks recently, Yemen needs journalists like Shaye to report on what’s really going on.”

  ANWAR AWLAKI’S BLOG had been shut down by the US government and the “Internet Imam” had no presence on the Web except for his essays in Inspire magazine. The one journalist who had dared to interview him was locked up. Now the White House wanted to finish the job. As it moved forward with its plans to assassinate Awlaki, the White House dispatched the US government’s top lawyer, Attorney General Eric Holder, for a high-profile television interview on ABC’s flagship morning show, Good Morning America. The interview was advertised as a “Blunt Warning on Terror Attacks,” with a banner proclaiming that the threat of “Home Grown Terror” was causing the attorney general “Sleepless Nights.” Holder said, “What I am trying to do in this interview is to make people aware of the fact that the threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant.” He added, “The threat has changed from simply worrying about foreigners coming here, to worrying about people in the United States, American citizens—raised here, born here, and who for whatever reason, have decided that they are going to become radicalized and take up arms against the nation in which they were born.” As images of Anwar Awlaki appeared, a headline flashed on screen: “New Top Terror Worry: Cleric Who Rivals Bin Laden.”

  The reporter brought up the “Underwear Bomber” who tried to bring down the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day and the cargo plane bomb plots. Awlaki is “an extremely dangerous man. He has shown a desire to harm the United States, a desire to strike the homeland of the United States,” Holder said. “He is a person who—as an American citizen—is familiar with this country and he brings a dimension, because of that American familiarity, that others do not.” The danger Awlaki posed to the United States, Holder said, was an ability to incite potential terrorists to act. “The ability to go into your basement, turn on your computer, find a site that has this kind of hatred spewed...they have an ability to take somebody who is perhaps just interested, perhaps just on the edge, and take them over to the other side,” he said. Awlaki “would be on the same list with bin Laden.” The reporter asked Holder whether the United States preferred to capture Awlaki and put him on trial or to kill him outright. “Well, we certainly want to neutralize him. And we will do whatever we can in order to do that,” Holder replied.

  Awlaki had now achieved epic status as the top US outlaw across the globe. The lawyers from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights who were fighting to stop the government from killing Awlaki were mystified that the government would present no evidence to back up the claims Holder and other officials were publicly making in the media and through leaks to a select group of journalists. “Even if what [Awlaki] is saying is criminal, charge him, try him. That’s still not a reason to send a drone into Yemen and kill him,” Pardiss Kebriaei, one of his lawyers, told me. “So whatever people may think, and whatever he may be saying, even if it has crossed the line, the point here is that the government cannot just determine, on the basis of some vague allegation of a threat, that he should be killed without due process.”

  The Obama administration disagreed.

  The time clock in the game of cat-and-mouse with US drones and Awlaki was running out. Obama was deploying teams from JSOC and the CIA to hunt him down and kill him. Former Navy Intelligence officer Malcolm Nance told me at the time that Awlaki was “dangerous on a strategic scale” and that he “definitely has a missile in his future. You cannot allow [him] to shape the battlefield ideologically and turn that into combat capacity.”

  Soon after the cargo bomb plot was foiled, British media outlets reported that British SAS forces were operating in Yemen alongside JSOC and Yemen’s CTU “in missions to kill or capture” AQAP leaders. In February 2011, the National Counterterrorism Center’s director, Michael Leiter, briefed Congress on the top threats faced by the United States worldwide. “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with Al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization, is certainly the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland,” he declared before the House Homeland Security Committee. “Al-Awlaki is the most well-known English-speaking ideologue who is speaking directly to folks here in the homeland.”

  The former DIA Yemen analyst Joshua Foust characterized Obama’s response at the time like this: “He immediately sent drones and special operations guys to Yemen. It was immediately, ‘Let’s send JSOC.’ Send in the Ninjas.” Without providing details, which he said were classified, Foust asserted that he had seen targeted killing operations conducted that he believed were warranted and that he did not believe such strikes were “theoretically a bad thing.” Foust, however, told me he was deeply concerned about the standards that were being used to determine who would be targeted for killing. “Frankly, most of the time when I was working on Yemen was spent arguing” with Special Operations Command-Yemen and other DIA analysts “about evidentiary standards,” he said. “The evidentiary standard for actually killing people off, to me, is frighteningly low. I think it’s like three separate corroborated HUMINT reports, and that’s it? In a court of law, that only amounts to hearsay. I don’t understand how people are that comfortable with killing people on evidence that thin.” He added, “If you are going to murder someone, you need to have a very good reason to do it, and you need to have absolutely unequiv
ocal evidence that this is necessary, and will materially advance our interests. And that just doesn’t happen.” Eventually, Foust said, his branch chief at the DIA “told me to back off and shut up.”

  The Curious Case of Raymond Davis: Act I

  PAKISTAN, 2011 —The burly thirty-six-year-old American would have blended in perfectly in his small hometown of Big Stone Gap, nestled in the mountainous countryside of rural southwest Virginia. With his checkered flannel shirt and blue jeans and scruffy, graying stubble, perhaps the only unusual thing about him would have been his choice of vehicle: a white Honda Civic rather than a pickup truck. But on January 27, 2011, Raymond Davis was not driving around Big Stone Gap, Virginia. He was half a world away, stuck in traffic in the chaotic streets of Pakistan’s second-largest city, Lahore. There, the Honda Civic blended in perfectly. It was a local rental car and bore a Lahore plate registered as LEC-10/5545.

  The full details of what happened at the Mozang Chowk intersection that day may never be known. And who exactly Raymond Davis is and what he was doing in Lahore—or in Pakistan in general—is even murkier. Within moments of Davis’s vehicle coming to a stop, three people would be dead, the American would be on his way to a notorious Lahore jail, mobs of angry Pakistanis would be calling for his death and the most significant diplomatic crisis between the Pakistani and American governments since the 1979 burning and ransacking of the US Embassy in Islamabad would be in full swing.

  If the official version of that day’s events, as provided by Davis and senior US officials all the way up to President Obama, is to be believed, then Raymond Davis was working at the US Consulate in Lahore, a bureaucrat who stamped passports and performed administrative duties—essentially, a pencil pusher—who found himself at the wrong place at the wrong time in a very dangerous city. According to this version of the story, Davis was the victim of an attempted armed robbery by two assailants who trailed him after Davis made a withdrawal from an ATM. As Davis sat in traffic, the would-be robbers pulled in front of him on a motorbike, one of them brandishing a weapon. Davis, fearing for his life, pulled out his .9mm semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot the men through the front windshield of his car in self-defense. After a brief car chase, Davis was arrested by the Punjab police. He held in his possession a diplomatic passport, entitling him to diplomatic immunity. President Obama called Davis “our diplomat.” Under the Vienna Conventions, no criminal charges could lawfully be filed against him in Pakistan, and Davis should have been handed back to US custody. Case closed.

  To accept this version of the story would require believing that an administrative staffer at the consulate would, by chance, be so cool-headed and so skilled with a Glock that he would react with an assassin’s precision to an attempted robbery, deftly taking down two assailants by firing his weapon from behind the steering wheel through the windshield of his car. That would be a remarkable feat for a “technical adviser” or a member of the “administrative staff,” as US officials characterized Davis. Never mind that US diplomats in Pakistan are not authorized to carry weapons.

  This, of course, is not the full story. In fact, the official version may actually be void of any substantial truth—save the obvious: that an American named Raymond Allen Davis shot dead two Pakistanis in broad daylight at an intersection in Lahore. The most vital pieces of this story are not Raymond Davis’s diplomatic passport, what type of visa he possessed or that the United States publicly owned him as a diplomat once he was arrested. Those are details of a cover story, part of which was preconceived and part of which was cobbled together on the fly.

  The Kot Lakhpat Jail on the outskirts of Lahore is home to scores of suspected militants and accused terrorists—men who would love nothing more than to have a chance in the dark of night to slit the throat of a suspected American spy. It was this jail where Raymond Davis was ultimately taken after a brief car chase through Lahore that ended in his apprehension by local police at the Old Anarkali Bazaar. Davis was not placed in the general population, but rather in an isolation cell in the jail’s “high security zone.” Some twenty-five suspected “jihadis” were transferred out of the jail once Davis arrived. For extra measure, the paramilitary Punjab Rangers were brought in to ring the wing of the jail. Although it was portrayed as a safety measure to protect Davis, it also served another purpose—ensuring that no one could break the American free. Pakistani intelligence knew things about Davis that inspired fears of that happening.

  Soon after his arrest, Davis was brought into an interrogation room. His interrogation was captured in a grainy film shot by someone in the room. “I need to tell the embassy where I am,” Davis insisted. “Just tell me the street.” “You’re from America?” someone shouted. “Yeah,” Davis responded. Still wearing his US government ID badges around his neck, Davis lifted them one by one to show his interrogators. “You belong to American embassy?” one of them asked. “No. It’s [the] Consulate General. It’s not an ambassador—in here, Lahore. I just work as a consultant there,” Davis responded, adding that he worked with the Regional Affairs Office, the RAO. They offered Davis a glass of water and Davis instead asked for a bottle of water. “Oh, pure water!” one of his interrogators exclaimed, sparking laughter in the room. “No money, no water,” the man added, inspiring more laughs. The questioning continued. Davis eventually signed a statement affirming his story that the shooting was in self-defense and the dead men were robbers. Davis repeatedly asked for his passport, which he claimed would show he was a diplomat. “Can you search the car for my passport?” Davis asked, adding that it might be under the seat or might have fallen on the road when he was arrested.

  The Pakistani authorities were indeed searching Davis’s car, but his passport would be the least interesting item they’d discover. They had already recovered Davis’s Glock .9mm with a stock of ammunition, including five magazines. In the vehicle, they also found two empty clips of ammo for the .9mm and another semiautomatic weapon, also with ammo. As the search continued of Davis and his car, they uncovered a cache of supplies that would seriously undermine the credibility of claims that Davis was a diplomat or a mere technical staffer at the consulate. Among the items: night-vision equipment, multiple IDs, several ATM cards, masks, a makeup kit used for disguising identity, a survival kit, a telescope, a sophisticated GPS device, a forehead-mounted flashlight, infrared equipment, a satellite phone and various wire cutters and knives. He also had an airline ticket. A check of the numbers on his multiple mobile phones revealed calls to twenty-seven militants from the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Tehrik-e-Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, according to Pakistani law enforcement sources quoted by the Express Tribune. On the memory card of Davis’s camera, investigators found photos of religious schools and government and military institutions near the Indian border. They also found an ID showing Davis as a US Department of Defense contractor.

  Meanwhile, reporters in the United States tracked down Davis’s wife, Rebecca, at their home in Highlands Ranch outside Denver, Colorado. She directed them to a phone number provided to her by the US government. It was a number at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

  During his interrogation, Davis told his inquisitors that he had come from the American Consulate when the attempted robbery took place. But according to the GPS device in his car, he had come from a private residence in the upscale Scotch Corner Upper Mall in eastern Lahore. “The accused has concealed the fact,” a police report later noted. “He refused to reply to any question during investigations, saying the American consulate had forbidden him to answer any question.” The house from which Davis departed earlier that day, if the recovered GPS data can be trusted, was well known to Pakistan’s spy agency.

  “BOY, WE’RE IN A WORLD OF HURT!” Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer recalled thinking the moment he heard of Davis’s arrest. “The spy game between the ISI and CIA has gotten much worse.” Shaffer, a veteran clandestine operator who had worked for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency on highl
y classified operations, coordinated the Human Intelligence program in Afghanistan in the early stages of the war there and planned covert incursions into Pakistan. He knew how high the stakes were when Davis was taken into custody by the Pakistanis. “The Obama Administration, senior level, probably didn’t know all of the details of what was going on,” Shaffer said.

  Long before the shooting at Mozang Chowk, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency knew Raymond Davis was not a diplomat and that he wasn’t sweating it out in the US Consulate stamping passports.

  Davis had arrived in Pakistan a week before the Lahore shooting, but that was not his first time in the country. He was a seasoned Special Forces operator, an ex–Green Beret who served as a Special Operations weapons sergeant. His last assignment in the military was with the 3rd Special Forces Group based at Fort Bragg, where JSOC is headquartered. In 2003, as the Iraq occupation was swinging into full gear, Davis left the military to become a private contractor, a move that would send him straight to the heart of US covert and clandestine operations. His first known trip to Pakistan was in December 2008, when he began working for the notorious private security firm Blackwater on a secret CIA contract. His job as a contractor for the Agency’s Global Response Staff (GRS) was to provide protection for CIA operatives deployed to Pakistan as part of the ever-widening presence of Agency personnel coordinating Washington’s covert war there. The gig often put him in direct proximity to case officers meeting with secret sources or preparing sensitive operations. His official cover, as a regional affairs officer at the embassy, was a common cover for CIA operatives and contractors.

  While Davis was working for Blackwater, the company was at the center of the CIA’s most sensitive covert operations in Pakistan, helping to run its drone bombing campaign and targeted killing and capture operations. Blackwater, which had long been used by the Bush administration as an “unattributable” force that could conduct off-the-books operations cloaked in secrecy and layers of subcontracts, had its tentacles in almost every aspect of US covert ops. Not only was the company working for the CIA on its assassination program, but it also worked closely with the Joint Special Operations Command. While at Blackwater, Davis was at the nexus of the key organizations running the covert campaign.