Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  The show had gone on long enough. And its ending was carefully choreographed by both governments. Under the diyyat provision of Sharia law, the families of a victim could “pardon” the accused and in return accept a payment commonly referred to as “blood money.” That would result in the criminal case against Davis being dismissed. But it required the consent of the victims’ families.

  On March 16, unidentified Pakistani agents forcibly took nineteen of the victims’ family members to Kot Lakhpat Jail. It was to be the day of Raymond Davis’s trial. The public was not allowed in, nor were reporters. Davis was, according to Punjab law minister Rana Sanaullah, charged with murder. But instead of witnessing the presentation of evidence, the testimony of eyewitnesses or the questioning of Davis, the family members were ordered to sign papers pardoning the American. “I and my associate were kept in forced detention for hours,” claimed an attorney for the family of Faizan Haider. Each of the family members was brought before the judge and asked if he or she pardoned Davis. Under intense pressure, all of them answered yes. The judge then dismissed the case against Davis and ordered his release. “This all happened in court and everything was according to law,” Sanaullah declared. “The court has acquitted Raymond Davis. Now he can go anywhere.” As retired Pakistani Brigadier F. B. Ali observed, “The diyyat provision is much loved by the rich and powerful in Muslim societies where it is in force; it literally allows them to get away with murder.”

  In all, the families were paid a total of $2.3 million. On a visit to Cairo, Secretary of State Clinton praised the arrangement. “The families of the victims of the January 27th incident pardoned Mr. Davis, and we are very grateful for their decision,” she said. “We appreciate the actions that they took that enabled Mr. Davis to leave Pakistan and head back home.” When asked about the payments to the families, she replied, “The United States did not pay any compensation.” Pakistan had in fact made the payment, which the United States would later repay out of the CIA’s budget.

  As Raymond Davis walked from the court after his release was ordered, tears streamed down his face as his victims’ families sat in stunned silence, some of them whimpering. Davis was swiftly escorted to a convoy of diplomatic vehicles and taken immediately to an airfield where he boarded a “special” plane—the type used in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The plane crossed into Afghanistan’s airspace, headed for Bagram, and Davis disappeared. “He’s gone,” Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer said, smiling.

  Twenty-four hours after Davis was freed, a US drone strike killed some forty people in North Waziristan. Things, it seemed, could now go back to the way they were before l’affaire Davis. But just six weeks after Davis was whisked from Pakistan, the secret war he had been helping to fight would be thrust to front-page news the world over when JSOC helicopters penetrated Pakistani territory in the dead of night and headed for the garrison town of Abbottabad. Their mission: to kill the most wanted man in the world.

  The Tsunami of Change

  AUSTRIA AND YEMEN, 2011 —In mid-2011, Yemen was caught up in the revolution that was sweeping the Arab world. The popular revolt against oppressive regimes in the region had begun on December 17, 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in Tunisia, took the ultimate stand. The young fruit-and-vegetable seller struggled every day in the poor rural city of Sidi Bouzid to make ends meet, facing constant harassment from local police and municipal employees who demanded bribes from him. On this particular day, Tunisian officials stripped him of his only source of income—when they confiscated his cart and goods because he did not have the proper permit. Bouazizi, enraged, ran to the governor’s offices, but the governor refused to meet him. Then, desperate and furious, he went to a nearby gas station, filled a jug with gasoline and stood in the middle of traffic. It was 11:30 in the morning. “How do you expect me to make a living?” he shouted before dousing himself in gasoline. He lit a match and his body erupted in flames.

  Within months, massive protests against the US-backed regimes of the Arab world had broken out in Middle Eastern and North African capitals, an uprising that became known as the Arab Spring. Several dictators fell, one after another: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia was the first to go. On January 25, a rebellion began against Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak that would ultimately bring an end to his regime. Yemenis watched as their Arab brothers and sisters in other countries faced down the dictators that had ruled their lives for as long as they could remember.

  Less than two weeks later, tens of thousands poured into a square in central Sana’a and renamed it Change Square. They announced that they would not leave until President Saleh and his family were removed from power. A new issue of Inspire was released just as the protests were spreading in Yemen. Its cover story on the Arab uprisings, “The Tsunami of Change,” was penned by Anwar Awlaki. “The first and probably most important change that this monumental event brought is a mental one. It brought a change to the collective mind of the ummah. The revolution broke the barriers of fear in the hearts and minds that the tyrants couldn’t be removed,” Awlaki wrote. “We do not know yet what the outcome would be, and we do not have to. The outcome doesn’t have to be an Islamic government for us to consider what is occurring to be a step in the right direction.” Awlaki embraced the protests against the US-backed regime in Yemen, writing, “Any weakness in the central government would undoubtedly bring with it more strength for the mujahidin in this blessed land.”

  On March 18, 2011, more than 100,000 Yemeni protesters gathered for Friday prayers in the streets near Sana’a University. As the prayers ended and people began dispersing, government security forces and pro-Saleh militiamen opened fire on the crowd, killing more than fifty people. Some of them were shot in the head by snipers. Three days later, a severe blow was dealt to the Saleh regime when the most powerful figure in Yemen’s military, General Ali Mohsin al Ahmar, commander of the 1st Armored Division, threw his support behind the protests and vowed to defend Yemen’s “peaceful youth revolution.” Other senior military figures soon followed suit. Senior civilian officials, including scores of ambassadors and diplomats, announced their resignations. Important tribal leaders, long the most crucial element of Saleh’s grip on power, swung to the opposition.

  As Yemen’s revolution was heating up, the United States was beginning a bombing campaign to support armed rebels in Libya that would ultimately bring down the regime of Colonel Muammar el Qaddafi. But in Yemen, the US government was playing a very different game. The prospect of losing Ali Abdullah Saleh made Washington very nervous. After all, AQAP in Yemen had been declared the most significant external threat facing the US homeland. Those running the US military and intelligence operations agreed with Awlaki’s assessment that instability in Yemen would benefit AQAP. In Egypt, longtime US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak had been overthrown, as had leaders of other Washington client regimes. Inspire published an ad in its Arab Spring issue that featured a picture of Ali Abdullah Saleh holding his finger up to his mouth in a “shhhh” motion. “Hey Ali, Mubarak just fell,” the ad read. “Guess who’s joining the party next?”

  While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other US officials condemned the violence in Yemen, they stopped far short of calling for an end to the regime or for international military action to confront the brutality of the Yemeni security forces. Instead, the US position was to call for a “political solution.” A few days after the massacre in Sana’a, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, on a visit to Moscow, was asked if the United States still backed Saleh. “I don’t think it’s my place to talk about internal affairs in Yemen,” Gates replied. What he said next spoke volumes about US priorities: “We are obviously concerned about the instability in Yemen. We consider Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is largely located in Yemen, to be perhaps the most dangerous of all the franchises of Al Qaeda right now. And so instability and diversion of attention from dealing with AQAP is certainly my primary concern about the situation.”
At the time, the Obama administration was in the midst of ramping up its training and equipping of Yemen’s military and security forces, including some of the very forces that were now repressing peaceful antigovernment protests.

  “The feckless US response is highlighting how shortsighted our policy is there,” Joshua Foust, the former DIA Yemen analyst, told me at the time. “We meekly consent to Saleh’s brutality out of a misguided fear that our counterterror programs will be cut off, apparently not realizing that, in doing so, we are practically guaranteeing the next government will threaten those very programs.” Gregory Johnsen told me that he shared some of Washington’s concerns but said the myopic obsession with terrorism was counterproductive. Saleh’s fall “could certainly have a negative impact on US CT operations in Yemen,” he said, adding, “I’m particularly worried that AQAP is gaining weapons and money in some parts of the country as the military begins to break down in outlying areas.” Yemen “has a number of more pressing problems that will, if left unchecked, all help AQAP gain strength in the coming years,” Johnsen cautioned. “In Yemen, there is no magic missile solution to the problem of AQAP. The US simply can’t bomb them out of existence.”

  Judging from its policies, the Obama administration apparently thought otherwise.

  ANWAR AWLAKI’S YOUNGEST BROTHER, Ammar, was nothing like him. While Anwar embraced a radical interpretation of Islam and was preaching for jihad against the United States, Ammar was pursuing a career working for an oil company in Yemen. Ammar was Canadian-educated and politically well connected. He dressed in blue jeans, wore hip Armani eyeglasses and sported a goatee. His hair was slicked back and he had the latest iPhone. The last time he had seen Anwar was in 2004. In February 2011, Ammar was in Vienna, Austria, on a business trip. He had just returned to his hotel after sampling some local cuisine with an Austrian colleague when the phone rang in his room. “Hello, Ammar?” said a man with an American accent. “My wife knows your wife and I have a gift for her.” Ammar went down to the lobby and saw a tall, thin white man in a crisp, blue suit. They shook hands. “Can we talk a bit?” the man asked, and the two men sat down in the lobby. “I don’t actually have a gift for your wife. I came from the States and I need to talk to you about your brother.”

  “I’m guessing you’re either FBI or CIA,” Ammar said. The man smiled. Ammar asked him for identification. “Come on, we’re not FBI, we don’t have badges to identify us,” the man said. “The best I can do is I can show you my diplomatic passport.”

  “Call me Chris,” the American said.

  “Was that your name yesterday?” Ammar replied.

  Chris made it clear he worked for the CIA and told Ammar that the United States had a task force dedicated to “killing or capturing your brother.” He told Ammar that the United States wanted to bring Anwar in alive, but that time was running out. “He’s going to be killed,” Chris told him, “so why don’t you help in saving his life by helping us capture him?” He added, “You know, there’s a $5 million bounty on your brother’s head. You won’t be helping us for free.”

  When Ammar told Chris he didn’t want the money, the American replied, “That $5 million would help raise [Anwar’s] kids. America is very frank, and I’ll just say it to you. There’s a $5-million-dollar bounty, and it’s up for grabs. And instead of someone else getting it, why don’t you get it, and help Anwar’s kids get raised decently?”

  “I don’t think there’s any need for me to meet you [again],” Ammar told Chris, reiterating that he had no idea where Anwar was. Still, Chris told Ammar to think it over. Discuss it with his family. “We can meet when you go to Dubai in two weeks.” Ammar was stunned. His tickets for that trip had not even been purchased and the details were still being worked out. Chris gave Ammar an e-mail address—a Hotmail account—and said he’d be in touch.

  Ammar returned to Yemen. “I talked to my mom and my brother [not Anwar] about it. And they said, ‘You stop it. Don’t even reply to them, don’t contact them again. Just stop.’” Ammar ignored the rest of the e-mails from Chris.

  The Fortress in Abbottabad

  WASHINGTON, DC, 2010–2011; PAKISTAN, 2011 —As the US manhunt for Anwar Awlaki intensified, the most wanted man in the world was spending his time hiding in plain sight. For years, it was assumed that Osama bin Laden was living in a cave or hiding in the tribal areas straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Some US officials thought the United States might never catch him, while some terror analysts believed bin Laden might already be dead. But bin Laden was very much alive and was living in the middle-class Bilal Town neighborhood of Abbottabad, Pakistan, in a large compound less than a mile from the Pakistani equivalent of the West Point Military Academy.

  It is unclear exactly when bin Laden had moved to Abbottabad, but construction on the residence had been completed in 2005. And it was clearly built for secrecy. The al Qaeda leader lived on the third floor of the largest house on the property with three of his wives and many of his children. Their residence was expertly designed to ensure that no one could see inside. It had almost no windows, save for some narrow openings on one of the walls. Ironically, on May 2, 2011, it was those very attributes of the home that would prevent bin Laden from seeing the well-armed US Navy SEALs who were whizzing across Pakistan on a mission to end his life.

  THE LAST SERIOUS CHANCE the United States had of killing or capturing bin Laden had come a decade earlier, in the winter of 2001 in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. A collapse in coordination between the Pentagon and CIA had marred that operation, resulting in bin Laden and his deputy, Zawahiri, disappearing—some thought for good. For the next decade, a determined group of analysts from the CIA followed one lead after another to a seemingly endless string of dead ends. With no human intelligence resources inside al Qaeda, no signals intelligence coming from bin Laden himself and little hope for support from authorities in the regions he was believed to be in, the CIA was stuck. In 2005, the bin Laden unit was shuttered, though a number of analysts continued to pursue the al Qaeda leader.

  Barack Obama had campaigned on a pledge to make Afghanistan and the fight against al Qaeda the centerpiece of his counterterrorism policy, and he blasted the Bush administration for dropping the ball in the hunt for bin Laden. As president, Obama had ordered CIA Director Leon Panetta to prioritize the search, labeling the killing or capture of bin Laden Panetta’s “number one goal” in May 2009. Obama’s orders had injected new life—and resources—into the search that had, for four years, largely been conducted by a small group of CIA analysts. While the CIA was ratcheting up its efforts to find bin Laden, not everyone in the intelligence community thought they would produce any result. In April 2010, Major General Michael Flynn told Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, “I don’t think we’re going to get bin Laden,” adding, “I think we’ll get a call one day from the Paks: Bin Laden’s dead, we captured al Zawahiri.” At the time, Flynn was the highest-ranking intelligence officer in Afghanistan and Pakistan and was serving directly under General McChrystal. As Hastings pointed out, Flynn “had access to the most sensitive and detailed intelligence reports.”

  But in August 2010, the CIA got its biggest break in the case since Tora Bora, when a CIA asset inside Pakistan spotted Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti in Peshawar. Kuwaiti had long been on the CIA’s radar and had been identified by various al Qaeda figures captured and interrogated by US forces in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 as a top aide to bin Laden and his primary courier. The Agency’s asset in Pakistan followed Kuwaiti’s white Suzuki jeep on a two-hour drive from Peshawar to the garrison town of Abbottabad. As the CIA analysts examined the details of the compound, which they likened to a “fortress,” they discovered it had no phone or Internet connection and that its residents burned their trash. They grew their own vegetables and raised their own chickens and cows. Every week, they would slaughter two goats. The analysts knew they had one of bin Laden’s trusted aides in their scope but also knew there could be a bigger fish living in the comp
ound—perhaps even the biggest. They decided not to try to capture Kuwaiti, hoping that he would lead them to bin Laden himself.

  In late autumn, Panetta directed his bin Laden analysts to compile a list of twenty-five ways to extract intelligence from within the compound. They had already considered placing devices in the sewage system or placing a camera in a tree near the compound. Eventually, the analysts came up with thirty-eight options. According to author Peter Bergen, “One idea was to throw in foul-smelling stink bombs to flush out the occupants of the compound. Another was to play on the presumed religious fanaticism of the compound’s inhabitants and broadcast from outside the compound what purported to be the ‘Voice of Allah,’ saying, ‘You are commanded to come out into the street!’”

  Eventually, the CIA enlisted a Pakistani doctor to administer a false Hepatitis B vaccination program in the neighborhood. The Agency wanted the doctor and his fake medical team to gain access to the compound and to extract DNA samples from the occupants so that they could compare them to samples the Agency already had from bin Laden’s deceased sister. The doctor involved in the effort, Shakil Afridi, was from Pakistan’s tribal regions. Eventually, the CIA would pay Afridi to run the fake program, which began in the poorer areas of Abbottabad in order to appear legitimate. In the end, the plan failed and Afridi and his team were unable to get any DNA samples. Afridi would later be arrested and imprisoned by Pakistani authorities for working with the CIA.