Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  But his new, wild setting did not please the authorities. General Qamish, the intelligence chief, once again summoned Bin Fareed to tell him that “the Americans” wanted Anwar back in Sanaa, or, failing that, in another city—Aden or Mukalla on Yemen’s south coast. The motive was not entirely clear, but it seemed American officials were loath to see Awlaki go too far off the grid. If he was not in a city, he might be impossible to keep under physical surveillance, and he would be likely to send fewer e-mails and make fewer calls, conceivably escaping even the long electronic reach of the NSA, especially in Shabwah, where Al Qaeda had a foothold. Bin Fareed demurred, telling Qamish that if Awlaki was a dangerous influence it was better to keep him in Al Saeed, a tiny village where he was surrounded by relatives. “So I think it’s the right place for you, for him, for the Americans, and for us,” Bin Fareed said he told Qamish. “It’s far away from everything.” But Qamish insisted, and Bin Fareed dutifully made the five-hour drive from Aden to the village and told Anwar about the request.

  Anwar was polite and repeated his thanks for his uncle’s help in getting him out of prison. But he refused to leave. “No way will I accept to move my place, and I will live here,” Anwar said, according to his uncle. Bin Fareed sweetened the request with an offer to let Anwar live with him in his seaside villa in Aden—a far cry from his primitive village life. It did no good. “No, I don’t like it,” Anwar told his uncle. “Please allow me to live here.”

  Even as he became the most prominent radical imam on the web, showing his mastery of the new tools of blogging, Facebook, and YouTube, Awlaki had retreated into the protection and isolation of one of the oldest forms of social organization: the tribe. The twenty-first-century American-born preacher, multilingual, multinational, and technically savvy, was now in the village where his great-great-grandfather had built a fortress, where his forebears had struggled for generations, and where tribal traditions held more sway than government or law.

  Snapshot of Anwar al-Awlaki, thirteen (right), with his father, Nasser, at Yosemite National Park during the family’s summer trip to the United States, 1984. COURTESY OF THE AWLAKI FAMILY

  Nasser al-Awlaki, Anwar’s father, who studied and taught in the United States and served as Yemen’s agriculture minister and university chancellor, at home in Sanaa, 2015. HAMED SANABANI

  Imam Anwar al-Awlaki with one of his children, Abdullah, at a dinner during Ramadan, 2001, in Washington. A Washington Post video featured Awlaki explaining the holy month. VIDEO BY TRAVIS FOX

  Anwar al-Awlaki at Dar al-Hijrah outside Washington with neighbor Patricia Morris, who organized a candlelight vigil to support worshippers at his mosque after 9/11. TRACY A. WOODWARD/WASHINGTON POST

  After the 9/11 attacks, Awlaki, shown here preaching in a PBS news report, drew national media attention as an eloquent imam who condemned 9/11 and could explain Islam.

  An FBI surveillance photo of Awlaki on his way to a prostitute in Washington, February 2002. When he learned what the FBI knew about his regular visits, he fled the United States, saying it could “destroy” him.

  FBI agent’s notes on an interview with a prostitute about Awlaki’s visit, January 2002. She called him “sweet.”

  Obama in his high school yearbook at Punahou School, Hawaii, 1979. He wrote later of the temptation of radicalism, the possibility that he might withdraw “into a smaller and smaller coil of rage….Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that too, a name that could cage you pretty good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.” PUNAHOU SCHOOL

  Obama campaigning in Seattle, 2007. His vow that year to attack terrorists inside Pakistan if necessary drew scorn from rivals. Few realized that he was thinking of drones. ALLISON HARGER/FLICKR

  The MQ-1 Predator: the Bush and Obama administrations came to rely on the armed drone to kill suspected terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. Proponents said it was the most precise way to eliminate terrorists, but poor intelligence repeatedly led to civilian deaths. US AIR FORCE

  Morten Storm, a Danish biker-gang member who embraced radical Islam, traveled to Yemen and in 2006 became part of a study circle under Anwar al-Awlaki. He later grew disillusioned and became an agent inside Al Qaeda in Yemen for the CIA and Danish and British intelligence. COURTESY OF MORTEN STORM

  Yemen’s stunning capital, Sanaa, where Anwar lived at his father’s house and then was imprisoned for eighteen months in 2006–2007. He left the capital in 2008 and soon joined Al Qaeda. FRANCO PECCHIO/FLICKR

  A video released by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in 2014 showed (l to r) Awlaki, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the head of the group, together before Abdulmutallab’s attempted airliner bombing.

  After the Christmas 2009 airliner attack over Detroit, AQAP released a video that included this excerpt from the martyrdom message recorded in advance by the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, twenty-three. He told the FBI that Awlaki had helped direct the plot, prompting Obama to add Awlaki to the kill list.

  By March 2010, when he recorded this video, Awlaki was openly calling for killing Americans, including civilians. He dressed in military garb, with the Al Qaeda flag and the ceremonial dagger of Yemeni tribesmen in his belt.

  Among others influenced by Awlaki’s calls for violent jihad from 2009 to 2015 were (top row, left to right) Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen people at Fort Hood; Zachary Chesser, a blogger who wanted to fight in Somalia; Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed a member of the British Parliament; Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers; and (bottom row) Said and Cherif Kouachi, who killed twelve people in Paris at Charlie Hebdo.

  Starting in 2010, Awlaki and his American protégé, Samir Khan (right), often posed with weapons in Al Qaeda propaganda.

  Awlaki and Khan put out Inspire, a quirky magazine that both urged attacks and offered instructions on how to carry them out.

  Obama relied on his counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, who became a close and trusted aide, to manage drone strikes. PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE

  Obama announced Awlaki’s killing, without explicitly saying he had ordered it, on September 30, 2011, at a retirement ceremony for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, at Fort Myer, Virginia.

  Obama discussed his decision to target Awlaki in a May 2013 speech. But he never mentioned the drone strike two weeks later that killed Denver-born Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, sixteen, who had left his grandfather’s house in Sanaa to find his father. He was killed along with a teenage cousin; the strike was aimed at an Al Qaeda operative who was not there. COURTESY OF AWLAKI FAMILY

  In the years since he and his son were killed, Awlaki’s influence has only grown, as his sermons on Islamic history and calls for attacks have proliferated on YouTube and other Internet forums. Admirers have posted many tributes to him, including this Al Qaeda video, which calls him “the martyr of dawaah,” or Islamic teaching.

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  WWW JIHAD

  One day in December 2005, a group of young Canadians stood in a snowy Ontario field around a laptop, transfixed by Awlaki’s calm voice reciting “Constants on the Path of Jihad.” Six months later, the Toronto 18 were arrested and accused of plotting a sensational, if implausible, series of attacks, including storming Canada’s parliament and beheading the prime minister.

  In March 2007, Albanian immigrant brothers in New Jersey were caught on tape exclaiming about Awlaki’s brilliance in explaining the obligation to defend Islam. “You gotta hear this lecture,” said an excited Shain Duka, as an informant’s hidden microphone recorded the conversation.

  “They kicked him out of the US, and now they locked him up in Yemen,” said his brother, Dritan Duka. “He was talking about jihad—the truth, no holds barred, straight how it is.” Two months later, the brothers were charged with plotting to attack Fort Dix.

  If in the years after he retreated from Washington and London to Yemen Awlaki seemed to some of his family to be frustr
ated and adrift, a ballooning number of fans formed a different impression. Here was a Muslim cleric who had the Arabic knowledge and the American confidence to pronounce uncomfortable, even dangerous truths. Here was a smart, young English speaker unafraid to follow the Koran and the hadith wherever they led. Awlaki’s PhD plans may have been thwarted and his schemes involving real estate deals and language schools may have failed. But his online fans didn’t know or care about that. His Islamic teaching was kindling volatile emotions across the English-speaking world. It is worth stepping back to consider what powered his popularity. Why was Awlaki, in the cacophony of voices competing for the attention of young Muslims, so successful in winning their loyalty and, in some cases, moving them to action?

  The web matured to provide the tools Awlaki needed just in time to help him reach English-speaking Muslims with his exciting and enraging call: Your faith is under attack, and it is your duty to fight back. In 1998, Awlaki’s brother was selling cassettes of his early, unobjectionable sermons on the sidewalk in San Diego, a decidedly analog effort. Later, after leaving the United States, Awlaki spoke of trying to get his own television show on one of the big Gulf broadcasters. That didn’t happen. But as the Internet matured he was quick to exploit its possibilities. He mastered the voice and video messaging service Paltalk to lecture to big virtual audiences, with his lectures announced in advance on Islamic websites. His lectures began to spread effortlessly across the web and around the world, fans passing them to their friends and posting them on site after site. In 2005, the year he recorded one of his greatest hits, “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” three young PayPal employees were developing YouTube, which would soon become the platform that would give Awlaki’s message its greatest reach. “He appreciated the power of the Internet, and more than other jihadi scholars, opened up himself for online dialogue with young Muslims—men and women—as he encouraged them to submit questions and to contact him through email,” said Rita Katz, founder of the SITE Intelligence Group in Washington, which monitors militant web activity.

  The Internet seemed especially suited to the propagation of contentious messages that, in an earlier era, would never have made it into a newspaper or onto radio or television. In the privacy of their homes, young Muslims in the United States, Canada, and Britain were increasingly taking to their computers to satisfy their curiosity about the radical strains of Islam that seemed to terrify their governments. “Extremists are more and more making extensive use of the internet,” Britain’s Home Office said in a report delivered to Parliament on the July 7, 2005, bombings of London’s subway and buses. “Websites are difficult to monitor and trace; they can be established anywhere and have global reach; they are anonymous, cheap and instantaneous; and it requires no special expertise to set up a website.”

  Historians of terrorism have often found that personal contact is critical in pushing a young man (and it is still, almost always, a man) across the boundary from simply fantasizing about an attack to plotting one. Often enough, in the terrorism cases the FBI brought in the years after 9/11, the personal contact came in the form of a well-paid bureau informant who hung around a mosque enthusiastically advocating violence, a pattern that drew legitimate criticism of the bureau’s counterterrorism tactics. But long before they met the provocative informant, the would-be jihadis had usually spent many hours alone on the web, marinating in the endless debates about the obligations of Islam, the Western assault on the faithful, and the heroic deeds of young men daring to fight back, documented in stirring videos. In the menacing world of the online call to jihad, the figure that loomed steadily larger in the view of both the radicalized young men and their enemies in police and intelligence agencies was Anwar al-Awlaki.

  As Awlaki became notorious, there was recurring confusion about the nature and timing of his influence. By 2003, boxed CD sets of Awlaki’s lectures on the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the lives of the other prophets of Islam, his stirring tales of the early heroes of the religion, were in tens of thousands of homes and cars of Muslims in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Those recordings suggested an allegiance to the conservative Salafi school of Islam, whose devotion to the early followers of Muhammad implied a critical view of modern and secular life. But the early Awlaki did not yet fall into the small minority of Salafi believers who advocated violent jihad to return the world to the supposed ideal state of the seventh century, the Salafi-jihadis as they were sometimes called. By no stretch of the imagination could those CD collections alone have motivated anyone to commit an act of violence. To believe that listening to Awlaki’s early CDs caused terrorism would be as egregious as concluding that listening to gospel records caused people to attack abortion clinics because most clinic bombers owned gospel records.

  This distinction between the early and later Awlaki was sometimes overlooked. In later years, when investigators found Awlaki’s material amid the CDs and notebooks and thumb drives and laptops scooped up in a counterterrorism search, his name came to be a kind of explanation: So that’s why they came up with this crazy plot—they had been listening to Awlaki. That was an oversimplification. “If you were a second generation Muslim living in Britain from the late-90s onward and were interested in your religion, Awlaki would be among your favorite scholars,” said Alexander Melagrou-Hitchens, an expert on Islamic militancy in Britain and author of several insightful papers on Awlaki. “Pretty much every Muslim I know here listened to Awlaki back in the day—so having his stuff and listening to it was by no means a remarkable or strange thing to be doing and certainly didn’t mean that one was a jihadist.”

  As a careful tracking of his work shows, Awlaki evolved steadily from 2002 on toward an open scorn for non-Muslims and an endorsement of violent jihad. In some of his lectures in Britain in 2003 and 2004, and certainly by 2005, with “Constants,” Awlaki’s message had become overtly approving of violence, openly hostile to those he called kuffar, and dismissive of less martial interpretations of Islam. The significance of his early CDs is not that they encouraged terrorism; they did not. But the early recordings established his mainstream popularity, creating a more receptive audience for his later, militant message. Having established his reputation as a sober and scholarly preacher, he was more likely to get a hearing from his fans when he turned up the heat in his lectures and sermons. For that reason, Awlaki’s former fellow imam at Dar Al-Hijrah in Virginia, Johari Abdul Malik, began to warn young people away even from Awlaki’s most innocuous early recordings, calling the CDs “gateway drugs.” By the time the Toronto 18 and the Fort Dix plotters were extolling Awlaki’s call to jihad, it seems fair to draw a line from his words to their deeds.

  There was still uncertainty about what was cause and what was effect: Did a disaffected young man discover Awlaki’s incendiary material because he had already embraced militant Islam and was eagerly Googling “jihad” on the web? Or were Awlaki’s lectures denouncing the kuffar and lionizing the mujahideen—and the connections he made between gripping tales of early Islam and the plight of Muslims today—actually radicalizing people? By 2007, that question was being debated in the cubicles and conference rooms of the CIA, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the State Department. And at the FBI, which was casting a broad net in hopes of picking up anyone in the United States who was even considering the virtues of violent jihad, the ubiquity of Awlaki and his prolific, steadily more radical lectures became impossible to miss.

  By 2008, said Philip Mudd, then a top FBI counterterrorism official, Awlaki “was cropping up as a radicalizer not in just a few investigations, but in what seemed to be every investigation.” Mudd had worked in the CIA for years before being recruited by the rival FBI in 2005, just as Awlaki’s name began to be mentioned in government’s inner circles. Mudd said that Awlaki had become a formidable opponent, calling him a “magnetic character” and a “powerful orator in a revolutionary movement.” An April 2008 FBI memo referred to Awlaki as “a known Al Qaeda facilitator and o
perative,” though any intelligence supporting that label is redacted from the public version. In October 2008, Charlie Allen, the CIA veteran who had pushed for early drone strikes, then serving as the intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security, denounced Awlaki in a public speech: “Another example of Al Qaeda reach into the homeland is US citizen, Al Qaeda supporter, and former spiritual leader to three of the September 11th hijackers, Anwar al-Awlaki, who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen.” Allen’s comment marked the first time a government official had gone public with the growing worry about Awlaki’s influence.

  In late 2001, Awlaki had aspired to be, along with other Muslim Americans, a bridge between the West and Islam. Now he was becoming a bridge of a different kind, carrying his admirers along on the same journey he himself was making, from a conservative, but essentially accommodationist, mainstream Islam to its radical, intolerant, and violent offshoot. Instead of explaining Islam to the West and the West to a billion Muslims worldwide, as he had once spoken of doing, he was instructing Muslims that the West was an irreconcilable enemy of the faith and that violence might well be the only legitimate response.