Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  Formalizing the matter, on September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret “Memorandum of Notification” giving the CIA carte blanche to hunt down and kill high-value targets in the al-Qaeda leadership. Bush also approved a list of about two dozen people whom the CIA was authorized to kill or capture without further presidential review and allowed the addition of names to that list with no permission necessary. On the day he signed the document, Bush spoke with reporters at the Pentagon, saying “I want justice, and there’s an old poster out West, as I recall, saying ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’” Reporting on the presidential “kill list,” the New York Times noted: “Despite the authority given to the agency, Mr. Bush has not waived the executive order banning assassinations, officials said. The presidential authority to kill terrorists defines operatives of Al Qaeda as enemy combatants and thus legitimate targets for lethal force.” The legal fig leaf outlined by Hays Parks was still respected. To keep track, Bush drew himself a diagram listing potential victims in order of importance, which he kept in a drawer in his office. It was in the shape of a pyramid, with bin Laden’s name at the apex.

  The counterterrorists had clearly failed miserably in their appointed task. But their mission was now a national goal. Within a few months of 9/11 their numbers had swelled from three hundred to twelve hundred and would soon soar to over three thousand. They had near-limitless resources. They still had little or no intelligence about the enemy, but they did have what seemed to be the perfect weapon, the newly armed Predator, and a license to kill. The list of targets could only grow.

  To accommodate the change, target as a verb took on a new meaning. Traditionally, targeting meant “focusing intelligence resources on some item of interest,” such as the Soviet Muslim population or the Italian Communist Party or a likely prospect for recruitment as a spy. Now the targets were individual humans, and a new profession of “targeters” was born. Their task was to assemble information on a future victim, his movements, associates, and habits, in order to set him up for the kill. Just as the counterterrorists had been called in from the moribund Soviet and Eastern European desks, targeters were recruited from the ranks of “reports officers.” This comparatively lowly occupation involves editing and rewriting case officers’ reports of intelligence from agents to obscure any clue that might hint at the identity of the source. Now, many of them would be retasked in this new specialty of targeter, which within a few short years would become the fastest career track in the agency, involving fully 20 percent of all CIA analysts. Many targeters spent their entire professional lives doing nothing else, rising steadily through the ranks as they developed greater expertise at hunting people, one by one.

  Since many people still thought there was a blanket ban on assassinations, despite Hays Parks’ pronouncement, a name change was clearly called for. So the A-word was supplanted by the more palatable “targeted killing,” which gradually crept into official and popular lexicons. In this, as in so many other aspects of the strategy, the trail was blazed by Israel, whose founders had been well versed in the practice of assassination, as in the killing of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte in 1948, from the earliest days. In fact, within weeks of Bush unleashing the CIA’s counterterrorists, Israel was already moving ahead, at least in the art of euphemism. For many years the preferred Hebrew term for assassination had been Hisul Memukad, meaning “targeted extermination.” But in November 2011 Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein decreed that that term “wrongs” Israel and mandated substitution of the phrase Sikul Memukad, meaning “targeted prevention,” which duly became both the official and popular term.

  In 2005, Avi Dicter, the retiring head of Israel’s internal security service, Shabak, was asked, “Do you have a problem with a state becoming an executioner?”

  “No,” he replied. “I’m telling you, foreign delegations come here on a weekly basis to learn from us, not just the Americans. It has become the sexiest trend in counterterrorism. Its effectiveness is amazing … the state of Israel has turned targeted preventions into an art form.” Dicter’s philosophy, as explained by another Israeli intelligence chief, was that “all the time we have to mow the grass—all the time—and the leaders with experience will die and the others will be without experience and finally the ‘barrel of terror’ [a Dicter analogy] will be drained.”

  “If you do something for long enough,” later observed Colonel (Res.) Daniel Reisner, former head of the IDF’s Legal Department, “the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.… International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassinations thesis and we had to push it. [Now] it is in the center of the bounds of legality.”

  Immediately following his retirement, Dicter spent several months as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where he coauthored “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists and Their Implications for the United States.” The paper reiterated his “barrel of terror” thesis, stating as a first principle that “the number of effective terrorists is limited,” thereby rendering their elimination especially productive.

  His argument found fertile ground. Discussing the post-9/11 U.S. assassination timeline, a former senior White House counterterrorism official drew my attention, unprompted, to the influential role played by both the kingpin strategists and the Israelis. “The idea had its origins in the drug war. So that precedent was already in the system as a shaper of our thinking,” he explained. “In addition, the success of the Israeli targeted-killing strategy was a major influence on us, particularly in the Agency and in Special Ops. We had a high degree of confidence in the utility of targeted killing. There was a strong sense that this was a tool to be used.” Echoing Dicter’s notion that the enemy has only a limited number of effective leaders, he noted that by targeting the “seconds in command, you force the organization to put up its third string, and so you get a steady decline in quality.”

  So, within a few short weeks of 9/11, the newly emboldened assassination machine began to crank into action, firing the first shot in a war that may never end. It missed.

  7

  LEGALLY BLIND

  On the night of October 7, 2001, the U.S. military and intelligence high command at the Pentagon, CIA, and various headquarters across the globe were gazing attentively at the video screens that had lately become such a prominent feature of their offices. The recent collapse of the dot-com boom meant that a huge amount of commercial satellite bandwidth capacity had become available for use by the military to transmit all the exciting video streamed by drones to an ever-wider audience. They were watching a grainy infrared video relayed from a Predator drone armed with two Hellfire missiles over the outskirts of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. The drone “pilot” was sitting in a trailer in a parking lot at CIA headquarters in Langley, although CIA drones in the war zone were under military control. The silent picture showed three vehicles and a motorcycle leaving a mud-walled compound and heading toward Kandahar.

  Among the far-flung spectators was General Tommy Franks, the four-star general commanding the assault on Afghanistan from his wartime headquarters in Tampa, Florida. “I felt a familiar rush of adrenaline,” Franks wrote later, for the spectacle took him back to long-ago days watching battles from a helicopter in Vietnam. “This target has all the characteristics of a leadership convoy,” reported a CIA counterterrorism officer who was watching from the trailer, a former day-care center, in the Langley parking lot. “This could be Mullah Omar’s personal vehicle.” Mullah Omar was the Taliban leader, a very high-value target. Here was a chance to eliminate the heart of the enemy war machine at a blow.

  “Valid target,” pronounced a military lawyer standing at Franks’ side.

  The convoy entered Kandahar and drove through the predawn streets, then stopped as some of the passengers got out and entered a building. “Valid target for Hellfire,” said
the lawyer, but the vehicles moved on before the drone could fire. When the convoy stopped again, several passengers entered a mosque, off-limits for a strike without special permission. Meanwhile, David Deptula, mastermind of the 1991 Iraq bombing campaign and theorist of effects-based operations who was by now a two-star general directing all allied air forces in the Afghan War, was also glued to the Predator video feed at his headquarters in Qatar. As he told me later with some irritation, he had four planes over the mosque, waiting for clearance to obliterate the building. “Suddenly a vehicle parked outside the building blows up. I said, ‘Who the hell ordered that?’” It turned out that Franks himself, chafing at the delay, had ordered the drone operator to fire a Hellfire missile at the vehicle, a Toyota Corolla. Like many people, Deptula was not used to the notion that commanding generals were now bypassing the entire chain of command to blow up cars. Minutes later, the remainder of the convoy came to a halt and various passengers disappeared inside a large building. Would it be in order to kill everyone inside, including innocent parties? Franks thought he had better consult Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

  Rumsfeld announced he was going to refer the matter to the president. Five minutes later he reported back that Bush had agreed the building could be hit. Then the CIA officer monitoring the video reported that the building might be a mosque. Franks, as he wrote later, “swore silently,” concluded that it didn’t look like a mosque to him, and ordered a waiting Navy F-18 fighter-bomber to bomb the building forthwith. “You’re still good,” said the lawyer. A few minutes later, Franks received a call from Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper, who had been watching the entire episode on the Predator screen in his office and who smugly informed him that he thought he had seen the high-value targets escape from the building before the strike. Enraged, Franks demanded that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have Jumper’s screen removed. In this new kind of war, video conferred power, at least in Washington.

  Unbeknownst to the high-ranking audience gazing at their separate screens, Mullah Omar had indeed been in the convoy. Earlier that evening an American missile had plowed into his home compound as he huddled in the basement, sparing him but mortally injuring his ten-year-old son. According to the Mullah’s driver, later interviewed by journalist Anand Gopal, the Taliban leader had set off with his family and dying child in the Corolla. But the child could not be saved. When the car exploded from the missile strike while he was inside the building, he and the rest of his family ran off (leaving the remainder of the convoy to proceed on its way), and he has not been seen by any Westerner since that day.

  Overall, the initial campaign in Afghanistan was deemed a great success, particularly by Rumsfeld, who relished the notion that it was all thanks to “a combination of the ingenuity of the U.S. Special Forces, the most advanced precision-guided munitions in the U.S. arsenal, delivered by U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps crews, and the courage of valiant one-legged Afghan fighters on horseback.” (Rumsfeld had been taken by reports of one Northern Alliance fighter charging the enemy despite a prosthetic limb.) There was a certain amount of truth in this. Resistance to the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance did collapse when the Taliban lost the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. But most casualties came after the Taliban surrendered, when many prisoners were crammed into shipping containers and left to suffocate. Had the air strikes really had the devastating effects as claimed in Rumsfeld’s history, there would have been a large number of wounded. Yet in the north, where the bombing had been most intense, there were very few fighters to be found among the casualties at local hospitals, even within days of the fighting. Elsewhere, where U.S. planes caught Taliban formations in the open, such as in front of the town of Tirin Kot in Uruzgan Province, they did inflict heavy casualties, but at Ghazni, which had been heavily bombed thanks to the large number of Taliban tanks based there, the total number of casualties, according to postwar local testimony, was three. More important contributions to the victory were the orders from the Taliban’s overseers in Pakistani intelligence to give up the fight and go home as well as the hefty cash payments handed out by the CIA to various Afghan warlords to abandon their Taliban allies.

  Meanwhile, the hunt for high-value targets was pursued with unrelenting but somewhat indiscriminate vigor. Bin Laden himself had slipped the net with relative ease. Having evaded efforts to corner him in his Tora Bora mountain redoubt, he took himself off to the mountainous and heavily forested Kunar Province and thence across the border to Pakistan, settling in the pleasant district of Haripur, where he lived in wedded bliss with his youngest wife for two years before moving to a purpose-built compound in equally pleasant Abbottabad. His immediate subordinate, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, also escaped. Less fortunate was Mohammed Atef, another Egyptian, who in addition to being generally considered the military commander of al-Qaeda was also a valued mentor to bin Laden. (Atef’s daughter married Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s son.) He was killed along with seven associates in a drone-assisted bombing strike during the initial American air assault, but was swiftly replaced as military commander by another Egyptian, former army colonel Saif al-Adel.

  The list in Bush’s desk had originally contained some two dozen names, but although the president carefully updated the list with excisions whenever news of a fresh kill came in, the number of nominated high-value targets continued to grow. Just as strategic bombing campaigns that commence with a limited number of select targets have traditionally tended to expand, the attack on Afghanistan that began as a hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11 inexorably widened. In part, this was a function of demand, as the number of hunters eager to join in the chase proliferated. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, irked by the prominent role played by CIA paramilitary teams in the initial overthrow of the Taliban, was eager to enhance the U.S. military role in covert operations. “Have you killed anyone yet?” he would query General Charles Holland, chief of Special Operations Command, whenever they met. In December 2001, a Joint Special Operations Task Force, code-named Task Force 11 for the occasion, with personnel drawn from elite units of all three services, arrived in Afghanistan with the specific mission of killing or capturing al-Qaeda and Taliban “HVTs” (high-value targets).

  Task Force 11 appeared to embody the vision of a twenty-first-century military as described in George W. Bush’s September 1999 speech at the Citadel: “agile, lethal … able to identify targets by a variety of means, then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly … able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy … with unmanned systems.” Not only did the task force have the services of the CIA’s Predators, armed and unarmed, the intensely trained elite troops also carried high-tech radios and satellite phones designed to put them in instant communication with commanders near and far. At their disposal were AC-130 Spectre gunships, which could not only lay down withering fire against enemies on the ground but also provide close-up pictures of any area a unit might be thinking of occupying, thanks to the profusion of TV and infrared cameras on board. The NSA and service communications intelligence assets vacuumed up targets’ radio communications and tracked their location. The drones rolling off the General Atomics assembly line gave commanders up to the level of Tommy Franks and beyond a bird’s-eye view of unfolding battles.

  Despite the profusion of sensors, it was still hard for the task force to find targets, because in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Taliban regime, there were few to be found. The al-Qaeda leadership had disappeared to Pakistan and elsewhere, as had many of the leaders of the regime. Most of the Taliban had simply retired from politics, at least for the time being, accepting that Afghanistan had entered a new era. Nevertheless, a central war aim of the U.S. military machine had been “to capture or kill as many Al Qaeda as we could,” according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The targeting apparatus embodied in organizations such as Task Force 11 and the CIA paramilitary squads demanded victims. Therefore, sup
ply met demand. Strongmen and warlords found they could dispose of two birds with one stone by denouncing rivals in local power struggles to the credulous Americans as Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders and thereby ingratiate themselves with the country’s new rulers. Even those with ironclad proof that they were not al-Qaeda or Taliban were swept up, including a Syrian named Abdul Rahim al-Janko, who had been arrested by al-Qaeda on suspicion of being a Western spy and tortured into giving a videotaped confession that he had been sent by the CIA and Mossad to kill Osama bin Laden. In a jail in Kandahar when the Taliban regime fell, al-Janko was handed to the Americans, who sent him to Guantánamo. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft later played part of the tape of his confession to journalists, claiming it was a would-be suicide attacker’s martyrdom video. The audio was muted, on the excuse that it might contain coded messages for other terrorists.

  Meanwhile the search teams thirsted for bigger game. “By February 2002,” Army Special Operations Colonel Andrew Milani drily noted in a later report, “the Joint Special Operations Task Force (i.e., Task Force 11) had become frustrated by the lack of actionable intelligence for high value targets.”