Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  He found heartfelt support from both men and women on the web forum, and after settling in at the language school in Sanaa he took on the job of advising others on the forum who were considering studying in Yemen. “Alhamdulillah,” praise God, he wrote, “i finally got my wish. After a hard battle deciding where to go and what to do, i finally ended up in Yemen. I’m doing a 3 month arabic course and so far it is just great.” Soon he was describing the weather, giving phone numbers, advising on women’s housing arrangements, and enjoying the position of authority. To study the language of the Prophet in the land of the Prophet; to meet people as devout as he was; to attend the lectures of scholars like Awlaki—all of it seemed to capture the imagination of the earnest Muslim from West Africa. It also planted the seed for his return in 2009.

  On November 19, 2009, exactly two weeks after Hasan committed his massacre, Abdulmutallab’s worried father, Alhaji Umaru Abdulmutallab, who had just turned seventy, showed up at the US embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. He was one of Nigeria’s wealthiest men, and he was accompanied by Nigerian security officials. His son was in Yemen and had cut off communications, he told the Americans, and he feared he might have joined Al Qaeda. It was a terrorism warning of rare clarity and authority, not unlike the complaints from some of Nidal Hasan’s military colleagues about his increasingly open embrace of extremist views. The senior Abdulmutallab’s dire message was accepted by the State Department, the CIA, and the National Counterterrorism Center, duly placed in the computer files, and then essentially ignored. Alhaji Abdulmutallab would learn his son’s fate five weeks later, at the same time as the powerful American intelligence agencies and the rest of the world, with the news of an airliner landing in Detroit.

  10

  I FACE THE WORLD AS IT IS

  It was Obama’s inauguration week in January 2009, a time of historic pronouncements and lofty predictions. On Tuesday, a frigid day, the new president touched on the terrorist threat that had shaped the previous American decade, but he framed his new approach as one rooted in ideals. “For those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that, ‘Our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken. You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you,’ ” Obama told the spirited crowd massed on the National Mall, where people climbed into the trees to try to catch a glimpse of the stage. In Yemen, as it happened, Yemeni and Saudi militants had chosen that day to announce a new alliance called Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), but that was an obscure news brief probably unnoticed by anyone in the exuberant crowd. Obama invoked earlier generations who had “faced down fascism and communism” not just with military force but with “sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.” “Our security,” he said, “emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.” On Wednesday, with a phalanx of retired generals and admirals standing behind him and photographers snapping away, Obama signed executive orders banning torture, shuttering the CIA’s black sites, and promising to close Guantanamo within a year. “We intend to win this fight,” he declared. “We are going to win it on our own terms.”

  Now, on Friday, just the fourth day of his presidency, in a detailed intelligence briefing in the Oval Office, the president was facing the grimmer facts of the terrorism fight. Vague euphemisms like “We intend to win this fight” were replaced by gruesome details of actual missile strikes. Michael Hayden, the outgoing CIA chief, went over plans for the latest drone operations in Pakistan, showing photos of recent strikes, explaining the guidance systems of drone-fired missiles, the blast radius of a Hellfire—all the technical details of targeted killing. Obama’s new team was there to learn: General Jim Jones, the new national security adviser; Admiral Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence; John Brennan, the counterterrorism adviser; and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. Hayden’s reputation as a “great briefer” had powered his rise from lowly intel officer in Guam to director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and then of the CIA. Now he was on the way out—Obama had decided to nominate Leon Panetta as CIA chief—but Hayden wanted to impress the new crowd.

  Obama was attentive and asked numerous questions. The drone, after all, offered him the middle ground he wanted between the wasteful big wars and doing nothing. It offered the extraordinary chance to take out terrorists without risking American lives. Hayden, who had proposed and run the escalated drone campaign in Pakistan for some six months, and who would describe the drone to me as “an exquisite weapon,” was the right man to sell this program. The CIA director left the White House convinced that he had done an excellent job. He was shocked the next day to get a call from Emanuel telling him that he had overdone the briefing: you will not brief this president like that again, Emanuel said. The chief of staff wanted to spare Obama the details of this grisly business. As president, Obama had endless responsibilities, and he needed to ration his time. Emanuel was concerned that the new president might get entangled in security issues to the detriment of domestic priorities.

  As it would turn out, Emanuel was wrong. Obama would insist on deep personal involvement in the drone program. He knew that what Bush had started, and what he was now expanding, had no real precedent in American history: the killing of suspected enemies in twos and threes and tens, based on secret intelligence, in countries where the United States was not at war. He did not trust the agencies carrying out the strikes to grade their own work. He felt it was his responsibility to invest the time—hours each week—to keep abreast of the operations and often to exercise his own judgment about what was justified and what was too risky. Obama, after all, had insisted throughout the campaign that he, unlike Bush, would show that American security could be assured without violating American values.

  Just how difficult this could be was illustrated by the first two CIA drone strikes of his presidency, carried out in Pakistan on the very day that Hayden gave his briefing. Obama would learn in the next day or two that civilians had been killed in both strikes, including several children, though the details remained in dispute, as was so often the case. The toll prompted Obama to ask the agency for even more information on its efforts to avoid killing civilians and its criteria for judging success and failure. The shock of those first strikes helped shape Obama’s decision to get involved and stay involved.

  “He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” Tom Donilon, then Obama’s deputy national security adviser and eventually Jones’s replacement, told me in a later interview. “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

  —

  Obama’s short tether for the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was a break with Washington tradition. There was an old White House term—“plausible deniability”—to describe how a president’s aides sought to distance their boss from fraught decisions. The notion was that American power would make something happen in a faraway place, but the hand of the United States—and certainly the hand of the American president—would not be seen. Historically, those decisions often involved trying to kill perceived foes of the United States. In 1960, for instance, President Dwight Eisenhower had suggested at a meeting with security aides that it would be a good thing if Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese firebrand whose leftist views the United States feared, were somehow to be removed from the picture. He issued no written order, and his musing would become public only in the recollection of a note-taker four decades later. But aides took it as an instruction, and the CIA began to organize an assassination plot. (The CIA station chief would hurl the poisoned toothpaste he had been given for the job into the Congo River. Lumumba would soon be killed, but not by CIA assassins.)

  When the Senate’s Church Committee, so named for its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, investigated intelligence misdeeds in the mid-1970s, the committee reported: “Non-attribution to the United States for covert operations was the original and pr
incipal purpose of the so-called doctrine of ‘plausible denial.’ Evidence before the Committee clearly demonstrates that this concept, designed to protect the United States and its operatives from the consequences of disclosures, has been expanded to mask decisions of the president and his senior staff members.” And one of the most curious documents to surface from the archives of American intelligence, a CIA assassination manual that appears to date from the early 1950s but was declassified only in 1997, explained in detail that when the United States killed an enemy, it would not be as the result of a written order from the president:

  Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity for committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.

  It was a creepy, disturbing document, hinting that the official version of American history might just omit unsolved murders carried out by government operatives on their own initiative and perhaps disguised as accidents—a tactic the manual also recommended. It reflected the pre–Church Committee era when the CIA operated virtually without oversight, an era that Obama abhorred.

  For there was more to Obama’s “short tether” on drone strikes than the practical question of keeping a close eye on lethal operations. In a way, Obama was engaged in a struggle over history. Never shy about comparing himself to Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the new president had a sweeping sense of his potential importance. As he had said often on the campaign trail, he believed his job was not just to keep America safe but to restore its principles to the fight against terrorism after the grave lapses under Bush.

  Obama knew the policies he abhorred had been championed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who had brought his own sense of history to bear on the response to 9/11. Cheney had been White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977, when the Church Committee carried out its unprecedented inquisition into the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. Cheney believed that the inquiry had gone too far and that the remedies that resulted from the committee’s exposure of assassination plots and spying on Americans unconstitutionally infringed on the president’s power. After 9/11, Cheney had famously spoken about the need to work “sort of the dark side” against Al Qaeda. His was the loudest voice for ignoring or overturning restrictions on the executive branch and returning to the pre-Church days of unfettered eavesdropping and covert operations.

  When he arrived at the White House, Obama was determined, in effect, to restore the Church Committee’s legacy—to prove, as he said repeatedly, that America did not need to make a “false choice” between its security and its ideals. When he gave the major national security speech of his early presidency, at the National Archives on May 21, 2009, he declared: “I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.” Reprising themes from the campaign and inauguration, Obama said that those values had been on display during World War II, when the United States had “shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law.” During the Cold War, he said, standing for the right values had permitted the United States to “overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism.” But after the shock of 9/11, he said, “unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions….We went off course.” Now, Obama suggested, the “season of fear” when the country had abandoned its principles had passed. “And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology.”

  —

  Speeches were easy. Figuring out what to do about threats was hard, and from the early days of Obama’s presidency the looming signs of trouble from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were evident. “There was complete shock when the new team came in and saw what shape Yemen was in,” said one counterterrorism official. He said the Yemeni-Saudi coalition of Guantanamo graduates and hardcore extremists who had formed AQAP seemed ambitious and competent. Drone strikes in Pakistan, stepped up in Bush’s last months and escalated further by Obama, seemed to be dismantling the core of Al Qaeda there, albeit at the cost of some civilian casualties and a growing political backlash. But in Yemen, where US intelligence was far sketchier, militants had mounted a complex assault on the American embassy in September 2008, using rocket-propelled grenades, automatic weapons, and at least two car bombs. The attack had killed twelve people, eleven Yemenis and one Yemeni American, in addition to six of the attackers. The embassy was situated on a hill in Sanaa’s northwest, not far from a poor neighborhood seen as a hotbed of Al Qaeda sympathy, and it had become a virtual fortress.

  Obama’s top security aides began making regular stops in Sanaa, pressuring Yemen’s cagey president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to take on AQAP. Saleh had long been viewed in Washington as an unreliable ally mainly interested in extorting cash from American coffers. But Saleh offered more and more expansive promises as he received in succession in 2009 a number of senior Americans, including Steven Kappes, the deputy director of CIA, and General David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, who oversaw all military forces in the Middle East. By the time John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, arrived in September, he had dropped all limits on American counterterrorism operations, according to the diplomatic cables later made public by WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group. “President Saleh insisted that Yemen’s national territory is available for unilateral CT operations by the U.S.,” a cable said, using shorthand for counterterrorism, “while at the same time placing responsibility for any future AQAP attacks on the shoulders of the USG,” or US government, “now that it enjoys unfettered access to Yemeni airspace, coastal waters and land.” Saleh played up the chances of another attack on the American embassy or other Western targets but declared: “I have given you an open door on terrorism, so I am not responsible.”

  It was a remarkable situation: the leader of a nation giving another country a blank check for military action in his land, asking in return only that he escape all blame for what happened. For this extraordinary surrender of his country’s sovereignty, Saleh got his reward: an invitation to meet Obama at the White House. But for the United States, the broad permission would open the door to grave missteps whose consequences would linger for years.

  —

  The CIA station and the military attaché’s office at the US embassy in Sanaa were getting steadily more crowded in the second half of 2009, as analysts and undercover officers arrived from the United States to beef up scrutiny on AQAP. A joint operations center in the capital where Yemeni and American counterterrorism officers worked together also was bustling. But in a classic catch-22, the same security threats that had drawn more American spies and special operations teams to Yemen made it risky for them to travel the country, develop sources, or sometimes even get permission to leave embassy premises. The Americans had to rely far more than they liked on reports from counterparts in Yemeni security agencies, who were viewed as a mixed bag both in competence and in sympathies.

  With HUMINT severely constrained, SIGINT became all the more important. In plain English, that meant that because human spies could not easily mingle with Yemenis to recruit and meet with agents, eavesdropping, or signals intelligence, had to bear a double burden. The eavesdropping station inside the embassy run by the S
pecial Collection Service, which did local eavesdropping on Yemeni government offices and suspected Al Qaeda sympathizers in Sanaa, was critical. The SCS, whose impressive headquarters was hidden away on a corner of the Agriculture Department’s research farm in Beltsville, Maryland, had been created in the late 1970s to settle a turf war between the CIA and the NSA; it was jointly run by officers from both agencies, usually operating under cover from embassies and consulates. Now the office juggled a growing stream of requests, directing high-tech antennas toward the cellular calls and military and police radios within its range. Both manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft cruised over Al Qaeda’s turf in the tribal provinces, monitoring cell traffic and the walkie-talkie radios the militants favored for short-range communications.

  Back at the NSA’s big station in San Antonio, Texas, a team was assembled to study Yemen’s communications system and how the NSA might better tap into it. From April until August 2009, technicians pored over charts of underwater cables, spreadsheets of communications satellite links, and statistics on Yemen’s nascent Internet and cellular networks. The analysts discovered that there were only about 320,000 Internet users and six million mobile phone subscribers in a population of about twenty-six million, though both numbers were rising fast. There were barely a million landline phones, nearly all in the cities. The analysts identified a few key telecommunications officials and computer system administrators who might be useful eavesdropping targets or, if hacked or bribed, sources of technical information. The SSAD team, as the Texas analysts were called, for Special Source Analysis and Discovery, also got more creative, studying whether a militant in Yemen posting a YouTube video might inadvertently reveal his location. The team compiled elaborate charts of telephone call routing, looking for spots vulnerable to intercept. They dug up cell phone numbers for important Yemeni officials and suspected terrorists. And they paid particular attention to international calls from Yemen to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda’s leadership was hiding.