by Scott Shane
When Fournier heard a few months later that Awlaki was actually on his way to the United States, his efforts seemed to be coming to fruition. “We were all pleased that a target of this importance was going to be picked up,” Fournier said. “He would have gotten a year at most, but we could have talked to him. We could have seen who visited him, who called him.” It was a blatant proposal for a fishing trip, but Fournier’s quest for more answers from Awlaki would later be echoed by the two major investigations of 9/11: leaders of both the Congressional Joint Inquiry and the 9/11 Commission believed that Awlaki’s connections had warranted deeper investigation.
But the federal prosecutor who was in charge of terror investigations in Colorado at the time, David Gaouette, ordered the arrest warrant withdrawn. He discovered that Awlaki had used his correct New Mexico birthplace when seeking a replacement Social Security card in 1996. As a result, Social Security officials said they would testify at any future trial that Awlaki was entitled to the Social Security number, that it was valid, and that Awlaki had himself corrected his erroneous application. It did not look like a viable fraud case to four veteran prosecutors who looked it over. Gaouette, who later served as US attorney, said that he and his colleagues knew little about the terrorism suspicions surrounding Awlaki but that they could not approve Awlaki’s arrest on the basis of Fournier’s insistence that the cleric was “a bad guy.” “We can only arrest people for a legitimate charge,” Gaouette said. “We follow the laws. We follow the Constitution.”
It is far from clear, in any case, that the FBI agents most knowledgeable about Awlaki, in Washington and San Diego, actually wanted him arrested. A still-classified memo regarding Awlaki was sent by the FBI director, Robert Mueller, to the attorney general, John Ashcroft, on October 3, 2002—a week before Awlaki’s arrival, probably about the time US intelligence learned of his travel plans. So the question of what to do about Awlaki appears to have been considered at the highest levels of government. In addition, documents show that Special Agent Wade Ammerman, of the bureau’s Washington Field Office, an Awlaki specialist by that point, was contacted in the flurry of calls on the morning of October 10. He appears to have done nothing to support Fournier’s efforts to have the cleric detained. It is possible that Ammerman and his colleagues, having already questioned Awlaki at least three times, believed it would be more fruitful to let the cleric roam the United States while keeping him under close surveillance.
And that leads to a mysterious nighttime encounter, later in October 2002, between Awlaki and Ali al-Timimi, the rival, radical Virginia cleric whose popularity with young Muslims had prompted Dar Al-Hijrah to hire Awlaki in the first place. In a highly controversial case, Timimi, an American-born biologist, was later sentenced to life in prison for encouraging some of his youthful followers to go to Afghanistan and fight American troops. In challenging his conviction, his lawyers said that Awlaki showed up at Timimi’s house one night and pressed him for help in recruiting fighters for jihad. Timimi found Awlaki’s conduct odd, his lawyers said, and began to suspect that he was wearing a wire and working for the FBI.
On its face, the notion that Awlaki might have been pressured into helping the FBI has a lot to recommend it. Perhaps the bureau did not protest the withdrawal of the Awlaki arrest warrant because it had other plans for him. Agents could easily have approached Awlaki quietly, perhaps even at JFK, threatened him with exposure or prosecution, and enlisted his help in the ongoing investigation of Islamic militants in Virginia. One heavily redacted FBI document related to the Awlaki investigation, dated October 22, 2002, has the synopsis “Asset reporting,” suggesting either that Awlaki might have became an “asset,” or source, or that someone else was reporting to the FBI about him.
But the bureau flatly denies that Awlaki was cooperating. FBI agent Ammerman, in his long-secret interview with the 9/11 Commission, describes Awlaki’s nighttime meeting with Timimi—both men were probably under surveillance—but gives no indication that Awlaki was working with the FBI. Asked whether the FBI played any role in directing Awlaki to visit Timimi, recording their meeting, or questioning Awlaki about the meeting after it happened, a bureau spokeswoman sent a one-word written answer: No.
7
STEALTHY, AGILE, AND LETHAL
When Senator Barack Obama stood at the podium at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center on August 1, 2007, to deliver his first major address on national security, he had a lot to prove. Just three years earlier he had been an obscure Illinois legislator. Now as a very junior US senator, he was proposing to take the helm of the country in the midst of two wars, with Al Qaeda still threatening attacks. Even to many who were captivated by Obama’s personal story, the notion of this former community organizer as commander in chief seemed a stretch. This was his chance to persuade the doubters, who were legion, that he was capable of leading the country at a fraught time for national security and military affairs.
Obama, reading from a teleprompter and looking considerably younger than his forty-five years, devoted much of the speech to a reprise of his famous opposition to the invasion of Iraq. His prescience about the war, he suggested, set him apart from all his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination—notably Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who had voted to authorize the invasion. Congress had “rubber-stamped the rush to war,” becoming its “co-author,” he said. “Because of a war in Iraq that should never have been authorized and should never have been waged,” he declared, “we are now less safe than we were before 9/11.”
Five years earlier, at an antiwar rally in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, Obama had warned that a US invasion would “only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.” By 2007, it had all come true, and Obama’s warning had become a central plank in his appeal to American voters. If he wanted to bask in his 2002 stance against the invasion, it was hard to blame him. The Bush administration’s rationale for the war, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, had long ago been exposed as a cruel hoax. Panglossian predictions that American troops would be “greeted as liberators” (from Vice President Dick Cheney, a supposed hard-eyed realist) and that the invasion would be a “cakewalk” were quoted only as the object of bitter ridicule. The war was burning through some $10 billion a month, and 3,647 American troops had been killed and more than 27,000 wounded. The headlines on the day of Obama’s speech were grimly familiar: “Three U.S. Soldiers Killed,” “Car Bomb Kills 17 in Central Baghdad,” “Sunni Arab Bloc Quits Iraqi Government.”
But the sound bites from 2002 of the young state senator speaking out against “a dumb war…a rash war” failed to capture the caution and care with which he had framed his argument at the time. The refrain of Obama’s 2002 remarks was not the motto of a peacenik: “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said—three times. He evoked the history of combat that he believed to be righteous: the Civil War, which drove “the scourge of slavery from our soil”; World War II, in which his grandfather and other troops liberated Hitler’s death camps and “triumphed over evil”; and the military response to 9/11, asserting, in a not entirely convincing show of personal bravado from this skinny lawyer, that “I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.”
Now, three months into his campaign for president, as he laid out his approach to national security, Obama knew that reminding voters that he would have kept America out of Bush’s Iraq quagmire was not enough. That was what he would not do. But what would he do?
If the speech had an affirmative core, it was Obama’s tough talk on terrorism—specifically the threat posed by militant sanctuaries in Pakistan to both the US homeland and to American troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, was distracted by his own problems, Obama said, and was not doing enough. A few weeks before Obama’s speech, my New York Times colleague Mark Mazzetti had reported that the Bush administration had prepared to
grab Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, at a 2005 meeting in Pakistan, only to cancel the raid as too risky. A week after Mazzetti’s story, I had written about a new National Intelligence Estimate that said Al Qaeda had regrouped in Pakistan and gave a dark assessment of a revived terrorist threat. Obama and his team had seized upon both stories as they drafted the speech.
“There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans,” Obama said. “They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an Al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.”
If he wanted to make a splash with that vow, he succeeded. But it was not quite what he had intended. His opponents spotted what they saw as an obvious greenhorn mistake and pounced. Obama was vowing, they claimed, to invade the sovereign territory of an allied country. Hillary Clinton, who had repeatedly labeled Obama “naïve,” took him to task for “telegraphing” US moves; a few months later, in a presidential debate, she spoke scornfully of his remarks: “He basically threatened to bomb Pakistan, which I don’t think was a particularly wise position to take.” Christopher Dodd called Obama’s comment “irresponsible.” Joe Biden called Obama “uninformed.” Most memorable was the strafing he got from Mitt Romney on the Republican side: “In one week he went from saying he’s going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he’s going to bomb our allies. I mean, he’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.”
Obama, returning fire, reemphasized the fact that his opponents had voted to authorize the Iraq War: “I find it amusing that those who helped to authorize and engineer the biggest foreign policy disaster in our generation are now criticizing me for making sure that we are on the right battlefield and not the wrong battlefield in the war against terrorism.” Maneuvering against far more experienced foreign policy hands, he would play his Iraq trump card again and again.
But it was not an invasion of Pakistan that Obama had in mind. Nor was it bombing in the traditional sense. There was a new weapon that had already captured his imagination, though the exaggerated secrecy that plagued American security debates made it too sensitive for a member of Congress to speak about it publicly except in the most oblique language. “I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America,” Obama said at the Wilson Center. “I will ensure that our military becomes more stealthy, agile, and lethal in its ability to capture or kill terrorists.”
No one in the broader public quite got it at the time. But Obama was talking about the drone.
—
In the weeks before his Wilson Center address, Obama had huddled with the foreign policy team he had assembled for the campaign to probe the policies he had in mind and to test the treacherous politics of terrorism for a candidate with his thin résumé. By late 2006, Obama had begun to reach out to a few experienced government hands to ask them not to commit to any presidential candidate because he might get in the race. Among them were Richard Clarke, the iconoclastic terrorism expert who had worked for both Clinton and Bush and had subsequently blasted the Bush administration’s failure to heed his warnings about a coming attack; Susan Rice, who had worked on Clinton’s National Security Council staff and was a protégée of Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state; Jeh Johnson, a former federal prosecutor and Air Force general counsel; and a few gray eminences, notably Lee Hamilton, a congressman from Indiana for thirty-four years before becoming a favorite appointee to troubleshooting boards, notably as vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Acting as staff for the brainstorming sessions was Denis McDonough, not yet forty, an aide to Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader, who had joined the Obama team earlier in 2007 after his friend Mark Lippert, a navy reservist, was deployed to Iraq. Ben Rhodes, just shy of thirty, an aspiring novelist who had spent five years as a speechwriter for Hamilton, was the wordsmith working with the senator on national security and foreign policy. They gathered in folding chairs in a distinctly unpresidential two-bedroom apartment above a Subway outlet on Massachusetts Avenue in the capital to hash out what Obama should say.
Those who did not already know Obama well soon discovered that he was neither a pacifist nor an ideologue, though both opponents on the right and admirers on the left consistently misunderstood this. At heart, for better or worse, Obama proposed to be a ruthless pragmatist, especially when it came to counterterrorism. If the staggering expenditure of young lives and national treasure in the two big wars was meant to make America safe from terrorism, he thought, it was a perverse way to go about it. Occupying Muslim countries for years with a small city’s worth of heavily armed and sometimes trigger-happy Americans was proving ineffective or counterproductive. On top of it all, the Bush war on terror—the very phrase rankled Obama, who saw it as intellectually ridiculous; the war was on Al Qaeda, he thought, not its tactics—had repeatedly violated the fundamental principles that Americans had for decades held dear. Secret detention and torture had squandered international support, ceded the moral high ground in a battle of ideas, and handed the enemy a potent source of propaganda.
But inaction was not an option, given the dire news from Pakistan. What if you could kill the terrorists without killing anyone else? What if you could do it without putting American lives at risk? The armed drone seemed to provide exactly the necessary third choice between doing nothing, on the one hand, and invading countries, on the other. For a presidential candidate whose main ambitions lay in the domestic arena, the drone seemed a godsend. It could lower the American profile in the Muslim world, depriving Al Qaeda of the foil that had allowed it to recruit an Iraqi branch of the terror network and reinvigorate anti-American passions. It offered the opportunity to take decisive action without the agony of American casualties.
In the discussions above the Subway shop, Obama had begun to articulate a simple principle that would become a mantra early in his presidency: Let’s kill the people who are trying to kill us. The number of Al Qaeda plotters whose aim was to attack Americans was in the hundreds. Yet several hundred thousand Iraqis and Afghans, and some four thousand American troops, had died in the two big wars since 2001. That tragic mismatch, in Obama’s view, had deepened America’s predicament. The drone, it seemed, if used judiciously, offered a way to scale the solution to the problem, picking off America’s real enemies one by one. At the time of Obama’s 2007 speech, there had been just a dozen drone strikes in Pakistan and only one in Yemen; the large-scale drone campaign in the tribal area of Pakistan would not be started for another year, in the last six months of George W. Bush’s second term. But to Obama and his advisers, the promise of killing with pinpoint accuracy from thousands of miles away—if CIA and Joint Special Operations Command claims were to be trusted—held indisputable appeal.
“The drones were coming into sight as the best available tool—maybe the only tool—to reach the safe havens,” recalled Lee Hamilton, who as president of the Wilson Center in 2007 introduced Obama to the audience at his national security speech and was impressed by the brash young candidate. Hamilton, who had spent all the years since completing the 9/11 Commission report focused on the terrorist threat, was deeply frustrated that Al Qaeda could still operate with impunity from sanctuaries in Pakistan. “My point of view was rather simplistic—I thought something had to be done,” he said. “The drone was the only thing we had to get at ’em.” There was little consideration in those early discussions, Hamilton said, of collateral damage, political backlash, or the dangers of proliferation. “It was full speed ahead,” he said.
Obama’s aggressive, if murky, vow to take tough action, so easily misconstrued, was seen by his rivals as a clumsy political ploy, the blunder of an amateur trying to look tough. It did, of course, result from a political calculation: if he was critiquing the Bush record he had to offer a persuasive alternative. But there
was more to it than that. Obama was attracted to technological solutions, especially if they seemed to offer a moral advantage. For a candidate who was revolutionizing the use of the Internet for fund-raising, recruitment, and messaging, technology seemed to offer solutions. For a guy in his forties who was never without his BlackBerry, there was nothing intimidating about the digital age. In health care, he promised that electronic records and shrewd management could cut costs and eliminate dangerous errors. In energy, he was smitten by solar, wind, and biofuels, fuel efficiency and “clean coal.” And in combating terrorism, he saw invading countries as decidedly old school, something left over from the era of the telegraph. The drone, using some of the same technology that was now creating the smart phone boom, might be the new, more humane way to protect the country.
—
If any American was prepared by his own background to understand the contradictions of Anwar al-Awlaki’s struggle for identity, it might have been the young Barack Hussein Obama, who wrote a whole book about his own diverse influences and difficult quest. The parallel was arresting: two men born in the United States to foreign fathers of Muslim ancestry and taken in childhood to live overseas in a Muslim country before returning stateside. Still, except in the overheated speculation of conspiracy-mongers on the far right, or just far out, Obama’s exposure to Islam was quite superficial and largely confined to childhood. The deeper analogy might be with the temptations of radicalism for a young man who finds himself alienated from the society around him, as Obama did off and on throughout his adolescence and young adulthood. Obama, a decade older than Awlaki, spent years puzzling over his relationship to the American mainstream and its values. As he negotiated the conundrum of race—even in the relatively soft atmosphere of an elite private school amid Hawaii’s ethnic mélange—he experienced the casual humiliations and frustrations of a racial minority. And at times, in reaction, he assumed an angry, radicalized stance.
