Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  While the Phoenix operatives were on their killing spree, the CIA’s intelligence component was of course tasked to furnish intelligence on every aspect of the war. Thanks to studious scrutiny of captured enemy documents, Sam Adams, a brilliant and dedicated analyst, concluded in 1967 that official estimates of enemy numbers were off by 50 percent. Colleagues and immediate superiors accepted his analysis, which rebutted official pronouncements of impending victory. The military high command, however, rejected it out of hand, a conclusion that was feebly endorsed by the CIA’s own leadership. Confronted directly by an indignant Adams, CIA Director Richard Helms revealed a basic fact of life in Washington that did much to explain why the agency has traditionally devoted the bulk of its energies to activities other than intelligence. “Sam, this may sound strange from where you’re sitting,” said Helms. “But the CIA is only one voice among many in Washington. And it’s not a very big one, either, particularly compared to the Pentagon’s. What would you have me do? Take on the entire military?”

  Adams suggested that that would indeed be the honorable thing to do, but Helms thought otherwise, as did prior and subsequent CIA directors. When, in the 1970s, other agency analysts began to question inflated estimates of Soviet military strength, powerful interests in Washington moved swiftly to impose a Team B composed of hawkish ideologues to reinterpret the analysts’ findings. Suitably chastened, the CIA did not veer significantly from the defense lobby’s self-interested assessment of Soviet strength and aggressive intentions right up until the final collapse of the Communist system.

  It is a commonly held view that with the exit of U.S. forces from Vietnam, hard-won expertise in fighting an insurgent enemy was discarded and forgotten as the military turned with relief to the simpler task of confronting the cold war enemy on the plains of Europe. But that is not entirely the case. The automated battlefield conceived and executed by Task Force Alpha sprang back to life within a few scant years of the exit from Vietnam as Assault Breaker, with ongoing conceptual resurrections, such as JSTARS in following years, right down to the drone system in the twenty-first century.

  The CIA, meanwhile, found itself under severe attack as unedifying incidents from its history, including assassination plots against high-value targets, such as the late Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961, became public thanks to zealous congressional investigators, prompting a public ban on such assassinations. The ban, first pronounced by President Gerald Ford in Executive Order 11905 in 1976 and reaffirmed by Presidents Carter and Reagan, stated straightforwardly that “No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

  It may have been the case that the CIA and the White House took these words literally for a little while, but within a few short years the ban was being creatively reinterpreted. This was made clear in 1983, when “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare,” a CIA instructional manual distributed to the Nicaraguan Contras, surfaced in the press complete with helpful tips on how officials of the Sandinista regime could be “neutralized.” Administration officials later explained to the Washington Post some of the ways in which the ban might not really ban assassinations, suggesting “… the order could be revoked or simply ignored, arguing that covert action against terrorists could be defined as something other than ‘political assassination.’”

  A pattern was now set: the United States would feel free to target individuals while insisting that the ban was being scrupulously observed—a contradiction in terms that press and public seemed happy to accept. So, in 1986 President Reagan sent a fleet of F-111 bombers to kill Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, along with whichever members of his family happened to be present. Spurred by deep-seated misconceptions and distorted intelligence, senior officials convinced themselves that Qaddafi, in the words of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, was “a cancer to cut out.” As would later become routine in the post-9/11 era, a state department lawyer obligingly furnished an opinion that the United States had the legal right to preemptive attacks against terrorists, thus justifying killing Qaddafi. State-sanctioned murder, however, was still a touchy subject at the time, so the small group inside the White House promoting the mission, according to an authoritative account published not long afterward, put fake targets on the official orders while simultaneously drafting other secret orders for the pilots to strike Qaddafi’s tent. Senior officials were therefore able to plausibly deny that the raid was in any sense an assassination mission. Qaddafi survived the attack.

  So it was that the world at large believed that U.S.government-sponsored assassinations had been unequivocally forbidden by presidential edict. W. Hays Parks, a military lawyer working for the army’s judge advocate general, had helpfully devised a legal rationale for ignoring the edict in any foreseeable situation. Parks, a former marine colonel whose views on legal boundaries for the use of force tended to the robust, concluded that the ban was indeed intended to establish “beyond any doubt that the United States does not condone assassination as an instrument of national policy.” A public relations exercise, in other words. It did, he conceded, “preclude unilateral actions by individual agents or agencies against selected foreign public officials.” However, it all depended on what was meant by the word assassination. The ban was definitely not intended, stated Parks in his lengthy analysis, to limit “lawful self-defense options against legitimate threats to the national security of the United States or individual U.S. citizens.… [Any] decision by the President to employ clandestine, low visibility or overt military force would not constitute assassination if U.S. military forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States [author’s emphasis].” As Parks later explained to me, his memo was prompted by the increasing number of occasions in which the United States had confronted terrorists overseas. As a particular example, he cited the case of Fawaz Yunis, a Lebanese Shi’ite militiaman wanted on hijacking charges, who was kidnapped by the FBI after being lured to a boat in international waters off Cyprus.

  Since the military lawyer’s definition left plenty of wiggle room for any president who wanted to murder someone—“legitimate threat” along with “terrorism” and “other” being left undefined—chief counsels at the White House, the departments of Justice and State, the CIA, and the military services signed their concurrence with Parks’ judgment, thereby carving a legal highway straight through to the drone assassination programs of Presidents Bush and Obama.

  Targeting “high-value individuals” was not yet part of the official U.S. national security lexicon. As we have seen in the evolution of effects-based operations through the bombing wars of the 1990s in Iraq and Serbia, murder attempts on enemy leaders were gradually acquiring the supporting dignity of theory. Prefiguring a twenty-first century fascination with anthropology, CIA officials did advance a rudimentary rationale for the targeting of the leaders’ families. According to an authoritative account of the affair, agency officials theorized that in Bedouin culture, Qaddafi would be diminished as a leader if he could not protect his immediate family. The account indirectly quotes an agency briefing at the White House arguing “if you really get at Qaddafi’s house—and by extension, his family—you’ve destroyed an important connection for the people in terms of loyalty.” Some things had evidently not changed much since Air Vice-Marshall Ritchie’s ruminations in 1944 on the merits of assassinating Hitler.

  It would not be long, however, before the CIA, in partnership with a junior but ambitious agency, would discover a whole new field of individual targeting. For once there would be someone watching to see if it worked.

  6

  KINGPINS AND MANIACS

  The night that North Vietnamese SAM missiles slammed into the B-52s over Hanoi—something that was not supposed to happen—had permanently cured fighter pilot Rex Rivolo of any faith in official military wisdom and prom
ises. A few months later he climbed out of his F-4 Phantom fighter for the last time. After 531 combat missions he was done with war, or so he thought. Heading back to graduate school, he eventually earned a doctorate in physics. The next few years were the happiest in his life, teaching astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania while probing the far reaches of the universe as a fellow at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute. “That was a good time,” he reminisced fondly one bright winter morning in 2013 as we sat in his northern Virginia office. “All the beautiful space-telescope pictures, that all came out of the Institute.” Earlier, as we talked about his time in combat, he pointed to a framed photograph on the wall of a smiling twenty-two-year-old Rivolo standing on the wing of a Phantom. “Can you imagine giving that to this?” he laughed, indicating the sleek expensive fighter and to the carefree youth in the picture.

  By the late 1980s, Rivolo, always enthusiastic about a new project, had conceived an ambitious plan to create the first detailed map of the entire Milky Way, including the vast molecular clouds, billions of miles long, that form the basic building blocks of star systems. Such a map, he thought, could guide astronauts in future space voyages. “We have no idea what’s really out there, we are at a stage akin to where geographers of our planet were in the fifteenth century,” he said at the time. Simultaneously, he had been exploring the world of graphic art, building up a collection that would grow to over fifteen thousand pieces, including the six signed Miró prints, along with a Picasso and a Braque, that he proudly showed me on the walls of the passage outside his office. Still in love with flying, he joined the New York Air National Guard and flew air-sea rescue helicopters on weekends—“with fighter jets, you need to practice all the time if you want to stay alive”—once making a forced landing on the lawn of Andy Warhol’s Montauk estate and being greeted by the artist himself, “a gracious host.”

  Rivolo’s plan for mapping the galaxy involved no less than 5 million observations collected by radio telescopes around the world that would then be analyzed using specially designed computer programs. As with all Rivolo’s projects, his approach mandated a rigorous insistence on hard data, without which, he would pungently emphasize in his thick Bronx accent, theories and conclusions are no fucking use. To that end, he had acquired an expertise in statistics during his years in academia, along with a strong appreciation of how they could yield deeply buried truths otherwise invisible to the untutored eye. Such accumulation and manipulation of data were at the heart of a system he developed in the late 1980s to detect imminent failures in aircraft engines, which he hoped to turn into a profitable business venture. Leaving the stars behind, he launched a business to market it, “which promptly failed. I’m not a businessman.”

  So, in 1992, he returned to the world of defense, taking a job as an analyst with the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank housed in an aesthetically unprepossessing complex of buildings in Alexandria, Virginia, a few miles south of the Pentagon. Fortunately for Rivolo, he landed in the Operational Evaluation Division directed by Tom Christie, the mathematician encountered in earlier chapters as the collaborator of the visionary tactician John Boyd and later a thorn in the side of the military for his unsparing test reports. Rivolo, as it turned out, would provoke equally choleric reactions, not least in his dogged pursuit of the V-22 Osprey, an aircraft under development by the marines that could tilt its rotors to fly like either a helicopter or a conventional plane. Early on, he concluded that the V-22 was dangerously unstable in certain conditions, telling a marine general to his face that the true measure of its performance would be the number of “dead marines per flight hour.” (As of 2014, thirty-six people had died in multiple Osprey crashes.)

  Meanwhile, though the cold war had ended, America had embarked on another war, the war on drugs. Initially declared by Richard Nixon in 1971 in recognition of the political advantages of being seen as tough on crime, this war had been re-declared by President George H. W. Bush in 1989. Nixon had invoked the specter of heroin as a crime-fomenting menace to society; Bush fought cocaine for the same reason. Money was duly showered on every relevant department of government, including the Pentagon, where an Office of Drug Control Policy headed by a deputy assistant secretary was created to supervise the military’s role in the fight. In 1993 the Clinton administration awarded the post to Brian Sheridan, a tough and capable ex–CIA official. Sheridan, according to those who worked with him, was not impressed with what he found. Although Congress had bestowed a billion dollars a year on his office, no one in the government—not even the Drug Enforcement Agency, which could not tell him how many acres of coca plants it took to produce one kilo of cocaine—appeared to understand much about the actual mechanics of the cocaine trade or how to deal with it. More important, no one in the burgeoning drug enforcement bureaucracies seemed to know what the ultimate goal of all this effort might be and still less how to achieve it. Seeking an objective, intelligent analysis, Sheridan turned to the Institute for Defense Analysis and was duly presented with Rivolo and a more politically attentive former air force colonel named Barry Crane.

  This was not the first time that IDA had been called in to survey the drug problem. In 1971, while the Nixon administration was promoting heroin addiction as the major cause of crime in America, a White House official had commissioned the institute to study the issue. Unlike law enforcement departments whose budgets were directly impacted by drug policy, IDA had no bureaucratic stake in the matter. So, taking a cool, objective look at the data, the analysts concluded that there was in fact no evidence whatsoever for the claim, accepted unquestioningly by policy makers for half a century, that addiction was a major cause of crime or that addicts were inexorably enslaved to their habit. Since this contradicted the basic premises of all government drug policies then and since, the analysts’ report remained classified.

  Undeterred by reality, Nixon and his officials pondered means to strike at the drug traffickers who allegedly posed what today would be called an existential threat to American society. The ultimate solution appeared simple and obvious. Cloaked in euphemism as “clandestine overseas law enforcement” with an annual budget of $100 million was a scheme to eliminate the high-value targets (though that phrase had yet to be conceived) of the heroin business. As drug enforcement officials stated confidently in a 1972 meeting, “… with 150 key assassinations, the entire heroin refining operation can be thrown into chaos.” E. Howard Hunt, later infamous as a key member of the Watergate “plumber” unit, even traveled to Miami to consult with the Cuban exile leader Manual Artimes about supplying killers for drug enforcement work in Latin America. However, Watergate, Nixon’s exit in disgrace, and consequent investigations into the darker activities of U.S. intelligence brought trafficker-targeting fantasies to a halt for the time being. Though the congressional enquiries did not uncover the trafficker-targeting schemes, revelations about other plots generated the presidential edict barring assassinations, a ban that, as we saw in the previous chapter, administrations were soon doing their best to undermine.

  In the 1980s, cocaine replaced heroin as the officially prescribed menace, especially when ingested in the form of crack by poor people. Predictably, the furor had a nurturing effect on law enforcement as Congress showered money on existing bureaucracies and even created new ones. Coincidentally or not, this was a time when the growing decrepitude of the Soviet Union indicated that the cold war was drawing to a close and that therefore the national security apparatus, including the military and the CIA, should look for other justifications for their budgets. By December 1989, President George H. W. Bush was able to invade a foreign country, Panama, and seize and imprison its leader on the grounds of an antidrug operation. In such an atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that Nixon-era ideas about assassinating major traffickers swung back into fashion in Washington.

  In Colombia, the main source of supply for the American cocaine market, the business had been consolidated during the 19
80s into a limited number of “cartels,” of which the two richest and most powerful were based in the cities of Cali and Medellín. Among these major traffickers, Pablo Escobar, the dominant figure of the Medellín cartel, was to become an object of obsessive interest to American law enforcement as he successfully evaded U.S.-assisted manhunts before negotiating an agreement with the Colombian government in 1991, under which he took up residence in a “prison” that he had built himself in the hills above his home city. A year later, fearing that the government was going to welsh on the deal and turn him over to the Americans, Escobar walked out of the prison and went into hiding.

  The subsequent search for the fugitive drug lord marked a turning point. The cold war was over; Saddam Hussein had been defeated; credible threats were scarce; and the threat of budget cuts was in the air. Now the U.S. military, along with the CIA, deployed the full panoply of the surveillance technology that was developed to confront the Soviet foe against a single human target. The air force sent an assortment of reconnaissance planes, including SR-71s that were capable of flying at three times the speed of sound. The navy sent its own spy planes; the CIA dispatched a helicopter drone. At one point there were seventeen of these surveillance aircraft simultaneously in the air over Medellín, although, as it turned out, none of them were any help in tracking down Escobar. The decisive role in destroying his network of power and support was instead played by his deadly rivals from Cali, who combined well-funded intelligence with bloodthirsty ruthlessness. “We used Cali to get Medellín,” a former American ambassador to Colombia confirmed to me years later. His once all-powerful network of intelligence and bodyguards destroyed, Escobar was eventually located by homing in on his radio and gunned down as he fled across a rooftop on December 2, 1993. Though the matter is open to debate, a former senior U.S. drug enforcement official assured me unequivocally that a sniper from the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Delta Force had fired the killing shot.