Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins

by Andrew Cockburn

  A little after 9:00 a.m., as the first two vehicles moved out of one of these narrow passes, two fighter jets detailed for the operation began the attack. The first bomb landed beside the target vehicle, gouging a crater in the road five feet across and eighteen inches deep and flipping the vehicle over on its side. The watchers saw “dismounts” run from the other vehicles, turn the target vehicle right side up, and help passengers get out. A second bomb hit ten minutes after the first, this time landing directly on the target vehicle. The explosion blew apart at least seven people, leaving severed legs, arms, and other body parts strewn around the wreckage.

  The planes dropped another bomb ten minutes later and another ten minutes after that. The lengthy intervals, atypical of normal bombing tactics, signified the time it took for the analysts to locate the target phone via the IMSI Catcher on the drone circling overhead. But the bombs were ineffective: one exploded harmlessly on the hillside, and the other, a dud, hit the road some distance away and failed to explode. Adopting a different approach after the second miss, the commander directing the operation ordered two helicopters, “Little Bird” MH-6s, to finish the job. Accordingly, while one circled, the other dropped down low and hovered just above the ground, allowing the crew a clear view of survivors milling around the car. “It seemed as if the helicopter pilot had a picture … in his hand,” a survivor later recalled, surmising that he was looking for a particular target. Finally he loosed off a burst of machine gun fire that put a bullet right through the face of the man holding the phone. Then he began to move, circling around to take a closer look at the bodies and survivors from the rest of the convoy. The helicopters stayed on the scene for another hour before returning to base, leaving ten people dead at the scene. It had been a textbook targeted killing.

  That same day, ISAF issued a press release on the strike, as it normally did following operations of the secret task force:

  Kabul, Afghanistan (Sept. 2) – Coalition forces conducted a precision air strike targeting an Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan senior member assessed to be the deputy shadow governor for Takhar province this morning.…

  Intelligence tracked the insurgents traveling in a sedan on a series of remote roads in Rustaq district. After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft conducted a precision air strike on one sedan and later followed with direct fire from an aerial platform.

  The strike was deemed important enough for the secretary of defense himself, Robert Gates, who happened to be visiting Kabul, to call attention to it at a press conference the next day: “I can confirm that a very senior official of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was the target and was killed.… This is an individual who was responsible for organizing and orchestrating a number of attacks here in Kabul and in northern Afghanistan.”

  But Mohammed Amin did not die that day. The real target had been the SIM card tracked so meticulously by “intelligence.” Very unfortunately, it did not belong to Amin but to the real-life Zabet Amanullah, a man the task force analysts had confidently assumed did not exist. He had indeed existed, as a quick phone call to any of a host of provincial or Kabul officials—or even a glance at a newspaper—would have made clear. He had been campaigning for his nephew, a candidate in the upcoming Afghan parliamentary election, and he had been on his way to a rally when he was killed. The ground around his burned and twisted vehicle was littered with election posters, with slogans such as “for a better future” still legible. The dead, campaign volunteers all, included five close relatives, among them his seventy-seven-year-old uncle.

  Afghans, from President Karzai on down, were well aware of these obvious facts and said so. It made no difference. The spell cast by technical intelligence, with its magical tools of IMSI Catchers and cell-phone geolocation and social-network analysis algorithms and full-motion video, was too powerful for the truth to intrude, even after a dogged and resourceful investigator laid out the truth for all to see.

  Kate Clark had none of the high-tech intelligence aids, but she knew more about Afghanistan than those who did. She had arrived in Kabul in 1999, when the country was still in the iron grip of the Taliban regime. She was the BBC correspondent, and the sole Western journalist in the country. Expelled in March 2001, she returned after the regime fell at the end of that year and continued reporting for the BBC until May 2010, when she joined the in-depth research group Afghanistan Analysts Network. Clark was perfectly aware that the high-tech assassins had murdered the wrong man, or rather men, because she had known Zabet Amanullah well. She had listened to the diminutive five-foot-two-inch Uzbek’s life story, which included fighting successively for the Soviet-backed Afghan regime, the anti-Soviet U.S.-backed Mujaheddin, and the Pakistani-backed Taliban prior to 2001. He also recounted his serial torture experience, first at the hands of the Soviets, then while imprisoned by the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban commander Ahmed Shah Massoud (who kept him in a two-foot-by-two-foot-by-two-foot box for six months), and finally by ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service. These last, as he told Clark, were angry because he refused to join the reborn Taliban and go to fight the Americans. “They hung me from the ceiling by my wrists and by my ankles and beat me with chains.”

  Finally released by the Pakistanis in 2008, Amanullah had fled to Kabul, where he supported himself by opening a pharmacy while anxiously soliciting character references and guarantees of protection from influential figures in the capital and his home province. In the maelstrom of modern Afghan politics, alliances and enmities are always fluid. The real-life ambiguities of the relationships and connections required for survival in such a society do not necessarily conform to the neat abstractions represented in the diagrams generated by social-network analysis. So when Amanullah decided in July to leave Kabul and go north to campaign for a nephew running for Parliament against a notorious Takhar strongman, one of the people he contacted was the influential Takhar Taliban official Mohammed Amin, whose calls were duly recorded and irretrievably entered into the system by Amin’s hunters.

  Then came the inexplicable mix-up. Somehow, amid the swirling petabytes of America’s global surveillance system, the information identifying Amanullah’s SIM card, the IMSI number, was logged as belonging to Amin. From that point on, the task force had its unblinking eye on the former torture victim, nicknamed “Ant” for his short stature. Fixated on what their cell phone tracking equipment was telling them, they adopted the unshakable conviction that the Ant was in fact Amin, traveling under an alias. It was Amanullah whom they had followed north out of Kabul to Takhar, waiting and watching for the right time and place to attack. With eyes always on the telltale electronic signal, Amanullah’s exuberant election rallies, the fifty-car convoy of well-wishers that escorted him to his home village, his pictures in the newspapers, his radio interviews, his daily phone calls to district police chiefs informing them of his movements—all passed the high-tech analysts by. In a feat of surreal imagination, they did not question the unlikely proposition that an important figure in the Taliban would be traveling the countryside in a highly visible convoy or that the people who got out of the cars on that last trip through the mountains “apparently carrying weapons” might in fact be carrying cameras to photograph the scenery (as indeed they were). No one seemed to notice that the man holding the phone, killed with a carefully aimed bullet in the face from the helicopter, was actually calling the police. Their electronic data told them all they wanted to know.

  Rapid and outraged Afghan protests that the strike had killed innocent civilians did little to shake military confidence that they had done the right thing. “We’re aware of the allegations that this strike caused civilian casualties, and we’ll do our best to get to the bottom of the accusations,” said Major General David Garza, deputy chief of staff for Joint Operations. “What I can say is these vehicles were nowhere near a populated area and we’re confident this strike hit only the targeted vehicle after days of tracking the occupants’ activity.” All of the dead, as
far as the command staff were concerned, were ipso facto insurgents by virtue of their keeping company with Amin, whatever he was calling himself.

  Just to be absolutely sure that Mohammed Amin had not somehow infiltrated the convoy, Kate Clark tracked down and interviewed each and every survivor of the attack, not only getting their stories but also checking on who had been sitting in each seat in the six cars. Looking through Amanullah’s passport, which he had left in his Kabul apartment, she saw that he had visited Delhi for a few days in late April 2010, at a time when intelligence had the Taliban leader Amin in Takhar, organizing attacks on Americans.

  In December, Clark had a breakthrough. David Petraeus, the allied commander in Afghanistan who had made his name as the general that plucked victory from the jaws of defeat in Iraq, had always been assiduous in courting journalists, with great benefit to his public image. Impressed by Clark’s reputation as an acute and influential observer of Afghan affairs, the general invited her to dinner. Seizing the opportunity, she brought up the Amanullah case. Petraeus was unyielding in his stated conviction that they had got the right man. As he told a TV interviewer, “Well, we didn’t think. In this case, with respect, we knew. We had days and days of what’s called ‘the unblinking eye,’ confirmed by other forms of intelligence, that informed us that this—there’s no question about who this individual was.”

  Confident of the story as well as his proven ability to charm the press, the general actually granted Clark rare access to the mysterious unit that had organized the killing. “He basically ordered the Special Forces to be frank with me, as he was so happy that they’d got the right person,” Clark told me later. Within a few days she was sitting with the notoriously unreachable Joint Special Operations Task Force as they revealed the process that had led them to target the convoy: the extraction of Amin’s phone number from the relative they had held in Bagram, the correlation with the SIM card, the tracking of the SIM north to Takhar in July, and their utter certainty that they had got the right man, even if he was calling himself by another name.

  The experienced journalist was astounded at what she was hearing about the process that had led to the deliberate killing of ten people. The Special Forces refused to accept that they had mixed up two individuals, insisting that the technical evidence that they were one and the same person was “irrefutable.” They freely admitted that they had not bothered to research the biography of the man they thought they were killing. Amazingly, they claimed total ignorance of Zabet Amanullah’s existence. When she pointed out that Amanullah’s life and death were a matter of very public record, they argued that they were not tracking a name but “targeting the telephones.”

  “I was incredulous,” she told me. “They actually conflated the identities of two people, and they didn’t do any background checks on either person. They had almost no knowledge about Amin, and they hadn’t bothered to get any knowledge about Amanullah. It’s quite shocking.” Despite all Clark told them, the Special Operations warriors’ faith in their technical intelligence remained unshaken.

  The final nail in the coffin for the official story came six months after the attack. Michael Semple is an Irishman who has spent decades in Afghanistan getting to know the country intimately, speaks Dari (one of the principal languages), and, with his beard and habitual dress, can pass as an Afghan. As such, he has been able to forge contacts with many Taliban (getting himself expelled from Afghanistan by the Karzai government for his pains in 2008). In March 2011, six months after the death of Amanullah, Semple, after months of patient investigation, tracked down the real Mohammed Amin, very much alive and living in Pakistan. Amin readily confirmed many of the details unearthed by Clark, including his position as deputy shadow governor, the detention of a relative at Bagram, and the fact that Amanullah had been in telephone contact with him and other Taliban. In fact, according to Amin, the two men had spoken to each other on the phone just two days before Amanullah was killed. “There should not be any serious doubt about my identity,” Amin told Semple. “I am well known and my family is well known for its role in the jihad. Anyone who knows the personalities of the jihad in Takhar will know me and that I am alive.”

  The meeting left Semple with the strong impression that it probably hadn’t been such a good idea to put Amin on the list in the first place, classifying him as a “gray area insurgent,” someone who was indeed fighting against the government and NATO but who was a “rational actor” with a plausible list of grievances who could potentially be reconciled to the Afghan government. “I did come to the conclusion that it had not been such a good idea to kill Amin and that he was much more useful alive than dead. Someone you could negotiate with,” Semple told me.

  Being a Taliban “rational actor” in Afghanistan in 2010 was one quick way of climbing up the Joint Prioritized Effects List, which was numbered in order of priority. Meanwhile, despite what might seem to be Semple’s conclusive evidence that Mohammed Amin was alive and well, the military continued to insist they had “iron clad proof” that they had killed Amin but could not divulge what it was for fear of revealing “sensitive intelligence methods.” “On September 2, coalition forces did kill the targeted individual, Mohammed Amin, also known as Zabet Amanullah,” NATO spokesman Lieutenant Colonel John Dorrian told NPR in May 2011. “In this operation, multiple sources of intelligence confirm that coalition forces targeted the correct person.” Naturally, like any bureaucracy, the military is loath to admit mistakes, especially the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, with its useful cloak of mystery and omniscience.

  However, it is quite possible that, beyond covering their collective behinds, the people who told Dorrian what to say and those who briefed Petraeus and Defense Secretary Gates did believe that all truth was contained in the plasma screens depicting that fatal SIM card’s movements. As we have seen, there is a recurrent pattern in which people become transfixed by what is on the screen, seeing what they want to see, especially when the screen—with a resolution equal to the legal definition of blindness for drivers—is representing people and events thousands of miles and several continents away. (It is not clear where, or in how many “nodes,” the analysis of Amin/Amanullah’s movements was made. It would certainly have been easier to ignore common sense if the fatal conclusions were being drawn at some distant point in the network.)

  It had happened in Uruzgan in February 2010, when a Predator pilot in Nevada interpreted spots on a screen captured by an infrared camera fourteen thousand feet over Afghanistan as people praying, causing him to identify them as Taliban and therefore legitimate targets, while another, more open-minded observer, reviewing the same video concluded that the people in question “could just as easily be taking a piss.” Following Operation Anaconda, in February 2002, Special Operations commanders on an island off Oman, a thousand miles away from the battlefield, reviewed Predator video and thankfully concluded that one of their men that they had fought to rescue from an enemy-held mountaintop had died a heroic death, whereas in fact it was another American soldier, wounded and left for dead, who had fought on alone.

  Some among the military are aware of the problem and strive to resist it. A-10 attack planes, for example, are, as noted, designed to afford the pilots the best possible direct view of the ground through their canopies. They do also carry video screens on their dashboards displaying infrared or daylight images from a camera-pod under the plane’s wing, but the pilots are trained to treat these as very much a secondary resource. “We call the screens ‘face magnets,’ Lieutenant Colonel Billy Smith, a veteran A-10 combat pilot, told me. “They tend to suck your face into the cockpit so you don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside.” Thus on May 26, 2012, a U.S. Air Force B-1 bomber, relying on a video image of the target (the weapons officer in a B-1 sits in an enclosed compartment with no view of the outside world), destroyed an Afghan farmer’s compound in Paktia Province in the belief that it contained hostile Taliban endangering U.S. forces. Minutes before, tw
o A-10 pilots had refused orders to bomb the same target because they had scrutinized it closely with the aid of binoculars and concluded, correctly, that it contained only a farm couple and their children. Seven people, including a ten-month-old baby, died under the B-1’s multi-ton bomb load.

  Neat computer-screen diagrams of Taliban or other insurgent networks based on the record of cell phone calls between their members can give a false impression of precision, making it all the easier to accept the impossible, such as the dual identity of Amin/Amanullah. The maze of ambiguous personal relationships based on shared histories, ancient enmities, and family and tribal ties in which Zabet Amanullah and Mohammed Amin moved would be impossible to reduce to a social-network chart, especially when based on imperfect intelligence. The imperfection was boosted by the policy of rounding up numbers of Afghans not because they were Taliban themselves but because they knew people who were. As Michael Semple remarked, many Afghans “have a few Taliban commander numbers saved in their mobile phone contacts” as a “survival mechanism.” These phone contacts would go into the social-network database but not necessarily with any indication of what their relationships actually were. So anyone with a lot of calls to numbers associated with people already on the JPEL in their phone record was at severe risk of going on the list themselves.

  The whole complex effort was strongly reminiscent of the Operational Net Assessment approach to warfare promoted by the net-centric warriors in the 1990s, the notion that thanks to sensor, computer, and communications technology, all sources of intelligence and analysis could be usefully fused into a war-winning “shared knowledge of the adversary, the environment, and ourselves,” as an official manual put it. ONA was itself linked to the theories of effects-based operations (EBO), which, as we have seen, were defeated at the hands of Paul Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge war game. EBO had lost a little of its luster by the end of the decade, especially after General Mattis had banned the use of the term in his command in 2008. But the net-centric and target-list mind-set was very much alive, especially in the air force and in the rapidly expanding Special Operations Command. Stanley McChrystal himself, former chief of staff of Task Force 180, was fond of quoting (without attribution) the Rand pundit and netwar promoter John Arquilla’s aphorism “it takes a network to defeat a network.”