Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  If anyone had had time or inclination to get curious, they might have wondered why someone would send a new printer from Yemen, where such things are rare, to Chicago, where they are common. If the tiny Yemeni staff of the UPS store had happened to talk to their FedEx competitors, they might have found it odd that the same woman would split her business and not send both printers from one shop. If anyone at the businesses knew the student whose ID had been stolen, they might have realized, despite the facial veil, that something was amiss.

  None of that happened, and two sophisticated bombs, hidden in the printer ink cartridges and rigged to cell phone alarms, were on their way to the United States. Once again, AQAP was hijacking the American air transport system to launch an attack. Passenger airlines had tightened security again in response to the 2009 underwear bomb plot; the terrorist group was changing up, shifting its attention to the cargo system. Perhaps AQAP plotters knew the old adage in counterterrorism, a cliché in the post-9/11 era: the terrorists only had to succeed once, while the security agencies had to succeed every single day.

  Once again, however, the Americans got lucky. Just two weeks earlier, a Saudi militant with an intriguing history, Jaber al-Faifi, had contacted Saudi authorities from Abyan province in Yemen to say he was offended by Al Qaeda’s use of civilians as human shields and wanted to come home. Faifi, a soccer-loving youth who had drifted into militancy and was caught in Afghanistan after 9/11, had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay from 2001 to 2006, when he was turned over to the Saudi government. He completed a rehabilitation program but eventually joined AQAP—this time, it seems, as an infiltrator on behalf of Saudi intelligence. The timing of his return to Saudi Arabia—on a Saudi government jet that picked him up in Sanaa—suggested a decision by him or his handlers that it might be too risky for him to stay in Yemen after the printer plot was foiled. After Faifi alerted them to the cargo plot, Saudi officials were able to get the actual tracking numbers of the two boxes shipped from Sanaa. Since Faifi had left Yemen before the packages were dropped off, he could not have been the source for the numbers; either he managed to get the information from another AQAP contact or he knew enough details of the planned shipments to permit UPS and FedEx to identify the packages.

  The day after the packages were shipped, a Thursday, Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi prince who had survived an AQAP bombing the previous year, called his old friend in the White House, John Brennan, with the tracking numbers. Bomb squads rushed to East Midlands Airport in central England, where the UPS plane had made a stop, and to Dubai International Airport, to retrieve the second box from the FedEx aircraft. At both locations, initial x-rays and examinations of the printers turned up no explosives, and security experts thought at first the tip might be wrong. Only when they dismantled the ink cartridges did they find that each contained nearly a pound of PETN, four times the amount of the same explosive that Abdulmutallab had carried in his underwear, rigged to a detonator designed to be ignited by a diode connected to a cell-phone alarm. There was no question that the bombs were capable of blowing up the aircraft, killing the pilots, and scattering the wreckage over the land below.

  As the aircraft were searched in Dubai and East Midlands, John Brennan visited the president in the White House family quarters at 10:35 p.m. to brief him on yet another near miss. “There was a five-alarm fire in the middle of the night,” recalled Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser. The next twenty-four hours were a blur of secure video conference calls as agencies scrambled to make sure no more bombs were on the way. Search teams swarmed planes landing at Philadelphia and Newark that were carrying shipments that had originated in Yemen. Fighter jets escorted an Emirates flight into JFK International in New York.

  From his shifting hideouts in the dunes and mountains, Awlaki had, in effect, sent his response to Obama’s decision to put him on the kill list.

  The bombs had been diabolically well disguised, a signature of Ibrahim al-Asiri. But the addresses on the boxes were erudite inside jokes that intelligence analysts believed to be a product of Awlaki’s macabre wit. Chicago—of course!—was Obama’s city, whose skyline was featured on page 51 of the second issue of Inspire as the cover page for the magazine’s section titled “Open Source Jihad,” which gave instructions for mounting attacks. The two addresses, evidently taken from outdated online listings, were for Jewish institutions in Chicago. The names of the addressees were notorious anti-Muslim figures from distant European history: Diego Deza, responsible for the torture and death of many Muslims in his role as Grand Inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition; and Reynald Krak, a French knight during the Second Crusade who had slaughtered Muslim pilgrims and eventually was beheaded by Saladin, the Islamic hero who defeated Western invaders in the twelfth century. The labels were informed by the sense of eternal grievance that Awlaki shared with his fellow militants—that Islam had always been under attack, from the Crusades to the present. The would-be targets combined Awlaki’s usual collection of villains: Jews, Christians, and Obama. At the CIA, analysts remembered how Awlaki eight months earlier had quizzed Rajib Karim, the British Airways employee, about ways to evade airline x-ray machines.

  Obama was trying to stay focused on the economy and its still-sluggish recovery. The morning after the bombs were discovered, he stuck to his plan to visit Stromberg Sheet Metal, an employee-owned company run by an ex-marine in the suburb of Beltsville, Maryland. He wanted to highlight some steps the administration was taking to support small businesses. Once again, a terrorist plot from Yemen—from Awlaki—had thrown the administration off its stride. “It was just a further indication that AQAP was very committed to homeland plotting, and that Awlaki was at the center of that commitment,” said Ben Rhodes. It “certainly ratcheted up” the president’s focus on Awlaki, Rhodes said. After returning to the White House from his small-business promotion, Obama appeared in the press room for just four minutes to tell the American people, as he put it, about “a credible terrorist threat to this country.” His decision not to take questions, and his somewhat halting recital of the prepared statement, did not project great confidence. The president did not look like a happy man.

  After his sleepless night, Brennan then followed the president to the microphone, adding a few details and trying mightily to strike a note of competence and assurance: “I think the American people should feel particularly good that, since 9/11, the US government has built up a very, very capable and robust intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security system. And as a result of the strength of that system, information became available that we were able to act upon very quickly and that we were able to locate these packages.” Pressed by reporters for how the information “became available,” Brennan demurred: “We were onto this, but I’m not going to get into details about how we knew.”

  In fact, the bombs had been stopped not by the “robust security system” but only as a result of the Saudi tip, a fact reflected first in an unusual public statement of thanks from Brennan to the Saudi government and then by a call from Obama to Saudi king Abdullah to express his gratitude. Abdulmutallab’s bomb had been discovered only after he detonated it and it fizzled. This time the bombs were defused before they could be detonated—but American officials were only too aware of how close AQAP had come to succeeding. Gerald Feierstein, the US ambassador to Yemen, said in an interview with Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned television channel and online news site, that American authorities believed Awlaki was behind the printer bombs and that American and Yemeni forces were stepping up the hunt for him.

  With hindsight, the Americans realized that several packages containing books, CDs, and other items, shipped from Sanaa to erroneous addresses in Chicago in mid-September and monitored by security investigators, had probably been test runs by AQAP. By using the tracking numbers and timing the shipments as they traveled to the United States, Asiri, Awlaki, and their assistants could estimate when to set the timers to explode over American soil. AQAP later claimed it had been responsibl
e for the destruction of an earlier UPS flight, which had caught fire and crashed shortly after leaving Dubai on its way to Germany on September 3, 2010. American intelligence officials believe that Al Qaeda’s claim was bogus, but the official investigations of the crash did not come up with a clear cause.

  The episode and its reverberations were revealing. Once again, with the printer plot, the Al Qaeda branch that American officials described as the biggest threat, and Awlaki, who some said was the most dangerous terrorist at work against the United States, had failed. They had just barely failed, but they had failed. No one had died. Nothing had blown up. If Abdulmutallab had managed only to scorch his genitals, these printer bombs had merely delayed two cargo planes and inconvenienced a lot of security officials. Indeed, even if the two planes had both blown up with their four pilots and killed a few people on the ground, the death toll would have been smaller than the number killed that day in car wrecks on American roads.

  But of course terrorism does not operate that way. The root of the word, the Latin verb terrere, means “to cause to tremble.” Rarely does that require huge casualties. In both failed attacks, AQAP had demonstrated that it had the capability to penetrate American and international air security systems. With blanket coverage by the American and global media, the terrorists had riveted the attention of their enemies and undermined a sense of security in the West. They had imposed huge disruption on the international air transport system and multiplied the already considerable cost of trying to protect cargo planes.

  Al Qaeda had sometimes been described, sardonically but with some justice, as a media organization with a terrorist wing. Never was that truer than with its Yemen branch. AQAP had not killed a single American in years of trying, but it had preoccupied many agencies in the government of a superpower and generated regular headlines and endless cable television chatter. Its swift follow-up in Inspire to the foiled cargo plane plot was a case study in transforming defeat into victory. The cover of the third issue of Inspire, rushed out three weeks after the event, consisted of an image of a UPS aircraft and a bold-print price: $4,200, which it plausibly claimed was the total cost of what it was now calling “Op Hemorrhage,” adopting casual military shorthand. AQAP claimed in a “Letter from the Editor,” presumably written by Samir Khan, though some of the syntax sounds like Awlaki, that the scheme had “succeeded in achieving its objectives” and with disarming candor explained the meaning of success. “To bring down America we do not need to strike big. In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less players and less time to launch and thus we may circumvent the security barriers Americans worked so hard to erect. This strategy of attacking the enemy with smaller, but more frequent operations is what some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts. The aim is to bleed the enemy to death.”

  In a separate, one-page explanation in the same Inspire issue, the unnamed “Head of Foreign Operations” elaborated: With security very tight on passenger airliners, AQAP had made a deliberate decision to target cargo aircraft, he wrote. “Our objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy,” he wrote. He claimed that an AQAP bomb had brought down the earlier September 3 flight over Dubai. He explained the choice of addressees from the Inquisition and the Crusades and noted that the synagogue addresses were in “Chicago, Obama’s city.” Clearly the Head of Foreign Operations wanted to be sure no one missed his cleverness. His punch line, ending the small essay, dropped a big hint about his identity, noting that the plotters had placed a particular English novel in one of the printer boxes: “We were very optimistic about the outcome of this operation. That is why we dropped into one of the boxes a novel titled Great Expectations.”

  Awlaki was being coy. The piece seemed certain to be his handiwork, confirming intelligence reports of his title and role in AQAP. Clearly he intended to be recognized when he harked back to his lengthy discussion on his blog in 2008 of his reading of Great Expectations and other Dickens novels while in prison. The grandly named “Foreign Operations” division of AQAP probably consisted of Awlaki, Khan, Asiri, and a few helpers, but it was having an outsized impact.

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  One consequence of the printer bomb plot was to ratchet up the pressure on the Saleh government to help the Americans neutralize Awlaki. For more than a year, Yemeni officials had been whipsawed by contrary pressures: AQAP certainly threatened the Saleh regime, and the Americans never stopped talking about the danger Awlaki posed. But there was countervailing pressure, too. Anwar’s father was a former government minister, his uncle was a powerful tribal leader in the south, and Saleh didn’t want to look like an American puppet. In October 2009, when Yemeni authorities sought the help of American intelligence to try to find and arrest Awlaki, the Americans had refused, remarkably, after CIA lawyers decided he was not a threat to Americans. Then, in April 2010, after Awlaki’s role in the Christmas bombing was public and Obama had authorized his killing, it was Yemen’s turn to call the secretive Americans’ bluff. “Anwar al-Awlaki has to us been always looked at as a preacher rather than a terrorist,” Yemen’s foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, told Yemen’s Saba news agency, “and shouldn’t be looked at as a terrorist unless the Americans have evidence that he has been involved in terrorism.”

  Now, with the printer plot in the headlines, Saleh came up with a compromise of sorts. Two days after the plot was foiled, Yemeni prosecutors brought a terrorism case against Awlaki as part of Al Qaeda and immediately began a trial in absentia. Along with a cousin, Othman al-Awlaki, he was charged with “forming an armed group to carry out criminal attacks targeting foreigners.” Specifically, they were accused of plotting with a third man, Hesham Mohammed Asem, nineteen, who was charged with fatally shooting a French engineer the previous October at the headquarters of the Austrian oil company OMV in Sanaa.

  The chief prosecutor, Ali Al-Sanea’a, tried to use Awlaki’s dissolute life in the West against him, describing him as “yesterday a regular visitor of bars and discothèques in America” but now “the catalyst for shedding the blood of foreigners and security forces.” He called Awlaki a leader of Al Qaeda and “a figure prone to evil, devoid of any conscience, religion or law.” The government put out the prosecutor’s diatribe in a public statement to make sure the Americans saw it.

  How significant a role Anwar al-Awlaki really played in the French engineer’s death, if any, was unclear. But when Obama spoke with the Yemeni president in the wake of the cargo plot, Saleh was able to tell him his government was not sitting idle but had put the cleric on trial just the day before. The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, offered a curt public nod: “We’ve been informed and we completely are supportive of Yemen’s announcement today of the indictment of Mr. al-Awlaki.” And by pursuing Yemeni criminal charges, Saleh’s government was, to outside appearances at least, standing up for Yemeni sovereignty and suggesting that the country could solve its own problems. Saleh, who bragged of dancing on the heads of snakes, may simultaneously have hoped to appease Awlaki’s family and tribe by offering an alternative to execution by American drone.

  The trial ended with a ten-year sentence for Awlaki. Had the Obama administration trusted Saleh, the Yemeni trial might conceivably have opened a path to Awlaki’s arrest and imprisonment, perhaps even his eventual transfer to the United States to face additional charges. But American officials, on the basis of long experience, saw Saleh as an unreliable partner. Nor did they believe that Yemeni authorities were capable of capturing Awlaki. Even if they managed to catch him alive, the record of Al Qaeda jailbreaks gave them no confidence that he would stay behind bars.

  The legal opinion justifying Awlaki’s killing was premised on the notion that his capture was “infeasible.” The word was absolute, but the reality was far more complicated. If American intelligence could find Awlaki in the wilds of Yemen, protected by a handful of bodyguards, it was clea
rly not inconceivable that a Navy SEAL team could cross the Saudi border in the middle of the night, surprise the encampment, and take Awlaki alive. Indeed, SEAL and Delta Force teams battle-hardened by years of raids in Afghanistan and Iraq might be said to specialize in the “infeasible.” But such a mission would be hugely risky to the American commandos, could spark protests in Yemen, and might well end with Awlaki dead anyway, in the gunfight that would likely break out on the ground. “It was an option and it was extensively discussed,” said a senior American official who knew Yemen well. “Can you come up with an op to capture? The answer everyone came up with was no. It was beyond Yemeni capabilities. And the blowback from a US operation would be too great.” So there was a legitimate case that a capture mission was unwise, if not quite infeasible.

  What went unaddressed in the two Justice Department legal opinions was the role of technology in influencing the decision to kill. When Obama and his security aides discussed the feasibility of capture, their thinking was inevitably shaped by the existence of the armed drone, which had already carried out hundreds of lethal strikes. Imagine that Obama, the former constitutional law professor, had decided that, in view of Awlaki’s American citizenship and the requirements of the Fifth Amendment, he should be captured alive and brought to the United States for trial. And say that one or more American commandoes were killed in the resulting raid. It is easy to imagine the furious public reaction. Congress and cable television would be aflame with second-guessing: When Obama knew Awlaki could be killed with a missile fired from a drone, with no danger to Americans, how could he possibly have insisted on endangering our troops?

  The drone, in other words, had enlarged the president’s options in some ways, offering an alternative to a large-scale military invasion. But it constrained the president in other ways. It’s interesting to speculate about what Obama might have decided had there been no drones. Would he have been willing to order a risky capture mission? Would he have turned up the pressure on Yemen to grab Awlaki? Would he have encouraged Saleh to negotiate with the tribes, which surely had the ability, if not the inclination, to take him into custody and hand him over?