by Scott Shane
By August 1, 2009, Awlaki was publicly taking the side of AQAP in its fight with Yemeni authorities. On his blog, he wrote excitedly about the “humiliating defeat” of government forces by the “mujahideen” in the tribal province of Marib, adjacent to Shabwah. In Awlaki’s retelling, which looked for larger meaning in a minor battle, the clash took on an almost miraculous resonance. Three government soldiers had been killed, five had been injured, and five tanks and two armored vehicles had been destroyed, Awlaki wrote, while the Al Qaeda force had grabbed “an entire truck load of weapons” and other gear. “Casualties amongst the ranks of the mujahideen: None. None killed, none injured and no damage to their houses or property either. The first face to face fight between the army and the mujahideen ended in a resounding victory for the mujahideen,” he wrote. “May this be the beginning of the greatest Jihad, the Jihad of the Arabian Peninsula that would free the heart of the Islamic world from the tyrants who are deceiving the ummah and standing between us and victory.”
The post marked yet another shift. Awlaki’s previous public utterances had embraced jihad largely in theory, while avoiding the explicit endorsement of any particular operation. This was different. Still living more or less openly in Yemen, though far from the capital and on tribal territory where he felt secure, Awlaki was endorsing the bloody insurgency of Al Qaeda against the Yemeni government and military.
Soon after that, he was becoming personally involved in AQAP’s plotting. Within weeks of his August blog post, he had approved the eager appeal of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to join the jihad, questioning him about his fitness for a mission and sending him to Ibrahim al-Asiri, the bomb maker. By then, some American counterterrorism analysts concluded, Awlaki had formed a small “external operations” cell within AQAP that included the Saudi-born Asiri and Samir Khan, an American who had proselytized for jihad from his parents’ North Carolina basement before moving to Yemen. That label may have implied a more formal organization than the loose terrorist gang really had, but its logic was clear: Awlaki and Khan were more focused on “the far enemy” in America than were most of the Yemeni and Saudi operatives in AQAP, who thought first about the fight closer to home. Asiri’s sophisticated bomb-design skills, wasted on ordinary IEDs and car bombs for use inside Yemen, were most important for penetrating the formidable security protecting the Saudi monarchy and American and international airports. Indeed, in August 2009, about the time Abdulmutallab was asking around Sanaa for contacts with Awlaki, Asiri fitted his own brother, Abdullah, with a bomb that he could wear either inside or very close to his body and dispatched him to Jiddah, where he claimed to be a repentant jihadi with urgent information about the threat to Saudi Arabia. Remarkably, he managed to talk his way into a personal meeting with Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi counterterrorism chief and a name near the top of the list of Al Qaeda’s Saudi targets. The bomb made it through metal detectors, and Asiri detonated it when he approached the prince. The force of the explosive suicide blast traveled vertically, however, blowing Abdullah’s anatomy into the ceiling while leaving the prince shaken but without serious injury. Ibrahim al-Asiri’s handiwork had managed to kill only his brother. But for Mohammed bin Nayef, already a confidant of John Brennan and a close ally of the United States, the fight against AQAP was now a matter of personal survival. Saudi intelligence stepped up its cooperation with the CIA against their mutual enemy.
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There were signs that Awlaki, too, was beginning to worry about survival. On September 8, the administrator of his website posted the transcript of an Awlaki lecture about the Guantanamo prisoners, which he had delivered on August 30 by phone to London, with an apologetic note: “I decided to post this on Sheikh Anwar’s Blog, even though I can’t get in touch with him to get his ok. Hope its ok Sheikh. We all know you are very busy.” Awlaki may have been busy trying to stay alive: he knew that using e-mail or a cell phone could make him easy to locate. On September 20, Awlaki’s blog wished his readers Eid Mubarak—a mandatory greeting for any imam on the holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. But the cleric who eight years earlier had so patiently explained Ramadan to non-Muslim Americans in a Washington Post video was not available to send the greeting himself. “I am sure that Sh Anwar would have loved to convey his best wishes to everyone, but at this stage he is unable to get to the Internet,” the website administrator wrote.
On October 7, Awlaki himself reappeared on the blog with another upbeat account of what he called the “surprising growth” of “the jihad movement” and the military success of the militants in several countries. The post, titled “Could Yemen Be the Next Surprise of the Season?,” recounted that “the Jihad of this era started in Palestine, followed by Afghanistan, then Chechnya, then Iraq, then Somalia, then the Maghreb,” or North Africa, “and the new front might very well turn out to be Yemen.” He noted that the largest bloc of foreign Muslim fighters in the wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq had come from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and that the Arabian Peninsula had been the birthplace of Islam. “When Jihad starts in the Arabian Peninsula, Jihad would be coming back to its home,” he wrote. He lambasted the al Saud family ruling Saudi Arabia and called for its destruction, without mentioning the failed suicide attack of Abdullah al-Asiri on the Saudi prince in charge of counterterrorism a few weeks earlier. “They wear cloaks of sheep on hearts of wolfs,” he wrote of the Saudi rulers. “There cannot be Islamic rule and a return to khilafah,” or a caliphate, a united Muslim state, “without removing them from existence and this is the responsibility of the mujahedeen of the Arabian Peninsula.”
And Awlaki’s blog post took on Obama directly, trying out the mocking “short leash” line that he would reprise in an audio message the following March:
The American people gave G. W. Bush unanimous backing to fight against the mujahedeen and gave him a blank check to spend as much as needed to fulfill that objective. The result? He failed, and he failed miserably. So if America failed to defeat the mujahedeen when it gave its president unlimited support, how can it win with Obama who is on a short leash? If America failed to win when it was at its pinnacle of economic strength, how can it win today with a recession—if not a depression—at hand? The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win. The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement.
By the time Awlaki made this extravagant boast, the Abdulmutallab operation was probably in the planning stages. Awlaki had declared his position on the side of Al Qaeda in its fight against the government in which his father had once served. His wives and children had left Shabwah. Overhead, he was spotting and hearing the Predators cruising over his tribal territory. He knew he might be a target, and according to relatives he feared his presence could endanger the innocent villagers of Al Saeed, many of them his blood relatives. So he decided to leave Al Saeed for more remote hideouts in the Al-Kur Mountains of Shabwah, where his ancestors had lived more than a century earlier and where Al Qaeda’s Yemen commanders had already found refuge.
But just one last time, Awlaki took the risk of posting on his blog, which required him either to go online or to use the phone or a courier to deliver his text. After Nidal Hasan carried out his shooting spree at Fort Hood on November 5, some of Awlaki’s followers began a debate in comments posted on his website about whether the murder of thirteen people in Texas was religiously justified. The demands for Sheikh Anwar’s view of the matter tempted him to take his chances with a final, inflammatory comment. On November 9 he weighed in with what would be his last and most infamous post: “Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing.” There is no evidence that Awlaki realized then that the army major who had yelled “Allahu akbar!” (God is great) and opened fire was the fawning, wife-hunting fan from his former mosque in Virginia with whom he had exchanged e-mails the previous February. But Hasan’s shooting spree completely accorded with what Awlaki had written on his blog that July: that any Muslim soldier who killed Muslims on behalf
of an infidel nation like the United States was “a heartless beast, bent on evil, who sells his religion for a few dollars.”
The next day his website administrator evidently grew concerned that Awlaki’s inflammatory declaration that Nidal Hasan was a hero might put him, too, in legal or physical jeopardy. He posted a lengthy disclaimer on the site distancing himself from Awlaki’s views: “We hereby declare and make absolute public declaration that the website anwar-alawlaki.com operates under the divine right bestowed by the Creator to freedom of religion and tasteful expression and that in no way, shape or form do we call for war against U.S. civilians.” Despite the administrator’s newfound concern that Awlaki might have overstepped the boundaries of “tasteful expression,” he was back the next day with a chipper promise: “Assaalmu’alaykum all, The website will be back to normal with a few days time.” It was not to be. No Internet host any longer felt like giving Awlaki a forum. After a stunningly successful run of less than two years, Sheikh Anwar’s blog was history.
By now, in any case, Awlaki was no longer satisfied with blogging about jihad. For better or worse, he had cast his lot with Al Qaeda. In early December, he helped arrange the filming of Abdulmutallab’s martyrdom video. A few days later, the young Nigerian was fitted with the underwear bomb, and Awlaki instructed him to wait until he was certain that he was over American soil before detonating it. On December 7, Abdulmutallab flew from Sanaa to Ethiopia, the first leg of several trips designed, as his Al Qaeda instructors had advised him, to put some distance between Yemen and his flight to the United States.
On December 17 came the devastating American strike on the Al Qaeda camp at Al Majala in Abyan province. It cost the terrorist group a dozen or more fighters. But by killing some forty-one civilians, half of them children, this opening strike in the American campaign gave Al Qaeda a huge propaganda opportunity, which it exploited with videos rallying tribesmen for war with the United States. “The Americans just scored a big own goal,” Awlaki wrote to Morten Storm in an encrypted e-mail, using a soccer term for a goal accidentally scored by a team against itself. Then, on December 24, came the second American strike of the month, another volley of cruise missiles hitting a house in Shabwah where US intelligence believed a meeting of Al Qaeda leaders was taking place.
The Yemeni embassy in Washington put out a statement saying that Awlaki was “presumed to be at the site” along with other top AQAP leaders, and early new reports claimed he was among the thirty or so killed. In fact, all of the top leaders had escaped. But if Awlaki had any doubts about the risk he was now running, they were ended in the rubble of the Shabwah house and the speculation about his demise. At the time of the December 24 strike, the Justice Department had not yet written its legal opinion justifying targeting Awlaki, which would be prompted by the Christmas airliner bombing the next day. American officials said that the official targets of the strike were other Saudi and Yemeni leaders of AQAP. But given his role in Al Qaeda, documented by months of intercepted communications, Awlaki was already considered by American authorities a member of the enemy force, not an innocent civilian. Had he been killed, he would have been counted as a combatant.
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The eavesdroppers at the NSA, and the counterterrorism analysts at the other agencies who read intercepted communications and wrote reports about them for distribution across the security establishment, got regular legal briefings on privacy protections for American citizens. In most cases, Americans who turned up on the NSA’s net were edited out of reports, their names replaced by the anonymizing phrase “US person.” Analysts were likewise instructed not to use American names in their searches of classified counterterrorism databases. “But there was a prominent Awlaki exception,” said one analyst then assigned to Yemen. “It was written everywhere that anything on him should be pursued.” For several years, the Justice Department had kept updating with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court an eavesdropping order on Awlaki, allowing the NSA to scan the ether for his phone calls and e-mails. In the Justice Department’s paradoxical legal reasoning, his American citizenship required a court order if the government wanted to intercept his communications—but no court approval was necessary to kill him.
The machinery of American intelligence, from satellites and surveillance drones to cell phone intercepts and paid informants, was zooming in on the very territory where American officials believed Awlaki and the rest of AQAP were hiding—the thinly populated territories of Shabwah and Marib that gradually gave way to the north and east to the vast, legendary desert called the Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter. Stretching across Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, the Empty Quarter consisted of drab gravel plains and red-tinted dunes that stretch for hundreds of miles, all but devoid of oases or of people. Along the western edge of the great desert were arid valleys and rugged hills like the Al-Kur Mountains that offered endless places to hide. The imagery analysts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency pored over detailed satellite photos and drone footage of the area, but unless the NSA eavesdroppers could pinpoint the location of a cellular call or a walkie-talkie signal, the landscape was barren of real clues.
By now, even the lowliest listeners and linguists in the American government knew it: Obama wanted the bomb maker, Asiri, and the leader of AQAP, Wuhayshi, but above all he wanted Awlaki. At the NSA, at the CIA, at the National Counterterrorism Center, at the Defense Intelligence Agency, at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the former Yemen analyst said, teams were assigned and spy gear was redirected to track Awlaki. “He was the guy everyone wanted to find. Everyone wanted to get a bullet point on Awlaki into the PDB,” the President’s Daily Brief, the analyst said. If the evidence that Awlaki was now “operational” made all the difference to the legal analysis, he posed a multifold danger, in the eyes of American officials. He lent to AQAP’s targeting of America a sophisticated knowledge of the enemy’s ways and thinking. He had the authority to give a religious gloss to attack plans. Perhaps most important, he was the most effective recruiter of English speakers to Al Qaeda’s cause, an alluring voice that the agencies, and the White House, wanted to silence.
But that was the problem. Scanning the petabytes of communications scooped up by the NSA was an exercise in frustration. Awlaki’s name, even his recorded voice, was everywhere on the web, and almost everything the computers tripped at turned out to be e-mails containing old quotations of Awlaki’s sermons, accolades from his admirers, or forwarded YouTube clips of his myriad lectures. It was like searching the Internet for Jay-Z. The problem was not too little material, but too much—nearly all of it useless. The tiny number of intercepts that seemed to reflect real knowledge of Awlaki’s current whereabouts—in calls or e-mails from the tribal areas, for instance—were frustratingly imprecise. Most often, they were mentions of Awlaki, or a “sheikh” or “imam” that sounded like it could be him, reporting that he had been spotted some days earlier in a particular village or heard at a mosque. The reverberations of his travels gave a general sense of where Awlaki might be, but with nothing like the specificity and timeliness required for a capture or kill operation. “We were pretty good at knowing where he was yesterday,” said an American official who was briefed regularly on the hunt. “But that didn’t help with where he was today.”
By now, Awlaki, like other Al Qaeda operatives, was routinely encrypting his e-mails. The NSA would become quite familiar with the militants’ favorite encryption program, called Mujahideen Secrets 2, or “MS-2” in agency jargon; Morten Storm, who had become disillusioned with militant Islam and started working with Danish, British, and American intelligence, delivered the software in late 2009 to Western counterterrorism agencies. But the measures Al Qaeda was taking to hide its footsteps made it tough to get real-time information on Awlaki’s whereabouts. When Scotland Yard arrested Rajib Karim and got hold of his hard drive, for instance, it took cryptographers nine months to decipher three hundred messages and discover the exchanges between Karim and Awlak
i. Karim had used encrypted Word documents that were digitally compressed and uploaded to web hosting sites; the web addresses for the documents, or URLs, were known only to Karim and Awlaki. It was the Internet-age equivalent of a Cold War dead drop, a loose brick in a wall or a rock in the woods where the CIA or KGB could leave secret messages.
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But Awlaki was not hiding everything he was writing. In June 2010, with the American hunt for him in high gear, Awlaki doubled down on his message in a way that would resonate for years. He and a young American acolyte named Samir Khan released the first issue of a breathtakingly brazen, English-language AQAP magazine they called simply Inspire.
With its breezy style, how-to features, and celebrity promotion, Inspire was a dead-on imitation of the American consumer magazine rack, Maxim for the jihadi set. But the do-it-yourself articles were about how best to maim, kill, and terrorize non-Muslims in the West, and the celebrities were jihadi heroes—Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, and most prominently “Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki,” whose name graced the top of the cover.
Some nonplussed American commentators immediately thought of the Onion and wondered if Inspire might be a sophisticated spoof. After all, would a violent religious fanatic devise the cover story “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” listing as the author “The AQ Chef”? It seemed too lighthearted, too much like a parody. In fact, Khan and Awlaki were attempting a marketing revolution for their ruthless cause, breaking once and for all with the ponderous, grimly serious style of Bin Laden and Zawahri. If casual observers saw the magazine as a kind of tasteless joke, counterterrorism specialists were shaken by the publication from the beginning. British intelligence attempted a clumsy dirty trick, inserting talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres’s favorite cupcake recipes into an early online copy of the first issue of Inspire. That odd sabotage became a forgotten footnote, as Inspire’s first issue, without the cupcakes, raced around the world, passed from enthusiast to enthusiast and embedded itself ineradicably on the web.
