Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  For better or worse, the drone had changed these calculations forever.

  12

  THE TIME FOR REAPING

  When the phone rang it was nearly midnight, and Ammar al-Awlaki was at the end of a long day on a business trip to Vienna—appropriately, as it would turn out, the setting for so many past spy tales in both history and fiction. The American voice on the phone gave an unfamiliar name. He was calling from the hotel lobby, he said, because he had a gift from his own wife for Ammar’s wife, who were old acquaintances. It seemed a little odd—he was calling in the middle of the night about this?—but Ammar believed the guy and headed down to the lobby.

  It was February 2011. Ammar had completed his education in the United States and Canada and returned home to Yemen in 2009, taking a job with an oil company. He was following the secular, technocratic path that his father had foreseen for Anwar and that Anwar had rejected. Ammar was not religious and had no use for the puritanical Salafi Islam that his brother had preached, let alone Anwar’s increasingly open embrace of violence. He had not seen his brother in person, he said, since 2004. Their last contact had come in October 2009: a brotherly phone call from Anwar in Shabwah to the family home in Sanaa, welcoming Ammar back to Yemen. Ammar appreciated the gesture. But the brothers had gone their separate ways.

  Entering the lobby, Ammar recalled, “I found this handsome guy, mid-thirties. He’s in a navy-colored suit, no tie, and he’s saying my name’s such and such.” But instead of handing over the present, the man asked Ammar if he’d like to get coffee. He realized instantly that the gift story had been a ruse. Several years earlier, while he was an engineering student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he had been questioned several times by Canadian intelligence officers. They had clearly wanted to size him up, but their main task had been to glean information for their American colleagues about Anwar, then imprisoned in Yemen. Now, he realized, the Americans were making a direct approach.

  “So I asked him, ‘Are you FBI or CIA?,’ ” Ammar recounted. “He said, ‘The latter.’ ” It was an unusual admission—CIA officers abroad usually mentioned cover jobs or kept their employer vague—and a sign that the conversation would be quite candid. The CIA man said that, as Ammar knew, there was a major American effort to capture or kill Anwar. Capture would be preferable, he said. Ammar immediately interjected that he had no idea where his brother was and no way to assist the hunt, even if he chose to do so. To prove that he was not in touch with Anwar, he said, he would be happy to take a lie detector test.

  The CIA man took the opportunity for an awkward segue. In fact, he said, he did have with him almost the equivalent of a polygraph machine. And at that point, in response to the CIA man’s signal, a second American walked up and joined the party. Ammar recognized him as a different breed. “This guy who’s behind us comes and says hi.” He was beefier than the first man and with an ex-military look, “wearing Oakleys and an olive-oil-brown-colored jacket.”

  The big guy introduced himself as Chris. “I said, ‘Was that your name yesterday?’, and he laughed and said, ‘We try to stick to one name a week.’ ” Ammar asked if they could prove they were CIA, and one flashed a diplomatic passport, though he pulled it back before Ammar could study it. Ammar joked that the first guy looked like CIA but the other one didn’t. He was surprised at his own composure. “For some reason, I did not panic at all,” he said. “It was like a friendly conversation, trying to convince me that Anwar would be killed or captured—please help us.”

  They asked Ammar what he thought would be the best outcome for Anwar—prison in Yemen or prison in the United States—and seemed taken aback when he said Yemen, where Anwar could be visited by his children. The CIA men joked about putting Anwar’s children in the witness protection program in the United States. They said they wanted to meet him again, still hoping to persuade him to help. “They said, ‘You choose whatever five-star hotel you want, you choose whatever airline you want, and we’ll fly you there and spend as much time as you want—but just agree to see us again.’ ” Ammar demurred.

  Finally they offered a brazen pitch—a proposal that, in effect, he sell his brother to the CIA. “They said, ‘You’ve lived in America, you know American culture, you know we’re frank people. And there’s $5 million for your brother’s head. It’s better that you guys take it and help put his children through school with that money instead of someone else.’ ” Ammar still kept his cool. “I was surprisingly calm, because I told them what I knew and I really did not have a way of helping them—even if I thought about it for a split second, which I did not.” The two men finally relented but gave him a Hotmail address in case he changed his mind. Occasionally they would check in with him by e-mail, and he would offer the same answer: he had no idea where his brother was.

  —

  About the time the CIA caught up with Ammar in Vienna, Michael Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was asked at a House hearing whether Awlaki posed as grave a threat as Osama bin Laden. “I actually consider Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, with al-Awlaki as a leader within that organization, probably the most significant risk to the US homeland,” Leiter replied.

  A year had passed since the Justice Department lawyers had declared that killing Awlaki would violate neither the law nor the Constitution. For a year, the intelligence agencies had directed their formidable capabilities at a cost-is-no-object hunt for the cleric. The National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, had thrown an electronic surveillance blanket over the entirety of Yemen. The CIA was paying agents like Morten Storm to help with the hunt and offering a reward of up to $5 million to relatives like Ammar and tribal contacts in return for bringing him in. (American officials offered money privately but did not publicize the reward, apparently because they or their Yemeni counterparts feared it would backfire, exposing anyone who helped the hunt to charges of selling out for foreign cash.) The NGA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was analyzing satellite and drone imagery, watching for Awlaki whenever they spotted groups of suspected Al Qaeda members moving around Yemen’s badlands.

  Asked what the government was doing to find Awlaki by then, one person centrally involved in directing the search replied, “Everything, right? You’re working human sources. You’re working signals intelligence. Everything. This is like any other manhunting anywhere. You’re looking at his associates. You’re looking at his family. You’re looking at his comms. And you’re trying to nail down where he is. And when you get down to the end, you’re using overhead assets to look for movement.”

  In March, the State Department weighed in with its own modest contribution: it revoked Awlaki’s passport on the grounds that his activities were “causing and/or are likely to cause serious damage to the national security or foreign policy of the United States.” Then, as required by federal regulations, the department sent him a letter informing him of the revocation. In perhaps an excess of optimism, the cable from Washington instructed the embassy in Sanaa that Awlaki must be contacted and informed that “an important letter” awaited him at the embassy: “Mr. Awlaki will need to appear in person and at that time post will then serve him with revocation letter.” The cable declared confidently that “the department has been informed that Anwar Nasser Awlaki is currently located at Rabat St., Sanaa, Yemen”—his father’s house. The punctilious compliance with regulations about notification, and the passport revocation itself, seemed oddly incongruous from a government that had already asserted the right and intention to kill the passport holder on sight. No one was surprised when Awlaki did not turn up at the embassy.

  He may have lost his American passport, but he had sought and received protection from both a new institution and an ancient one: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which had networks of watchers and informants across Yemen to send word of any search party that might turn up or any drone spotted overhead; and his family’s Awaliq tribe, in which neither his American
birth nor his terrorist plotting disqualified him from membership. The Awaliq were fiercely independent, with a celebrated reputation as warriors and a tribal chant that declared, “We are the sparks of hell; he who defies us will be burned.” Yet some tribal leaders were none too pleased that this American-born cleric was invoking the tribe’s protection, aware that if a volley of American missiles came at him, tribesmen and women around him would be endangered. “Even in the Awlaki clan Anwar was controversial,” said an American official who kept in touch with Yemen’s tribal leaders. “Some said to him, Never show your face in the village. Some felt differently.” In an interview with the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, the governor of Shabwah made the same claim when asked about Awlaki and other Al Qaeda militants, whom he accused of “misleading the people and persuading them that they are mujahedeen in the cause of Allah.” The governor, Ali Hasan al-Ahmadi, said the militants were “moving in the mountains and do not settle in any specific place. They are expelled by the citizens wherever they go who refuse to have them remain among them.”

  The governor was undoubtedly eager to counter the image of his territory as an anything-goes zone for terrorists, and he probably overstated the hostility of villagers to the Al Qaeda fighters—and certainly to Awlaki, whose family had deep and respected roots in Shabwah. The code of tribal hospitality was powerful, with ancient origins in an unforgiving desert and mountain environment where turning away a traveler could be tantamount to killing him. Abdullah al-Jumaili, a tribal sheikh in Al Jawf, near the Saudi border, described the rules to me in astonishing terms. “You’ve got to accept someone as a guest, even if they killed your son or brother,” he said. “Each guest has three days. After that he goes somewhere else.”

  In his interview with Al Malahem, AQAP’s media arm, Awlaki had affected an attitude of unconcern with the American manhunt, basing his confidence mainly on the sympathy of Yemeni tribes. “The concern that I am chased is not true. I go back and forth between the members of my tribe as well as other regions of Yemen, and that is because the people of Yemen hate the Americans and the people of Yemen want justice and the people of justice support the oppressed.”

  In other words—as both Bush and Awlaki had so often said—you were either with the jihad or you were with America. And America’s reputation in Yemen’s tribal areas had been seriously undermined by the strike in December 2009 that killed so many women and children and the one in May 2010 that killed the popular deputy governor of Marib province. “I go back and forth between al-Awaliq and I have a base of support in a large section of the people here in Yemen, whether in Obeida, Dahem, Waela, Hashed, Bakil or Kholan, whether in Hadramout, Abyan, Shabwah, Aden or Sanaa [all the names of Yemeni tribes or places]. Praise be to Allah, there are a lot of good people, even though they know they are taking risks and dangers due to America’s pursuit of them. Despite that, they graciously and happily come forward and host us with the most refined hospitality.”

  And Awlaki returned this “most refined hospitality” with his own visible tribute to the tribes. In all his video messages after he fled Sanaa, Awlaki took care to appear with a traditional ceremonial dagger, a jambiya, in his belt; to practiced eyes, the hilt of the dagger showed it was made in the style of Shabwah. He wore the jambiya in a lengthy video message in November 2010, showing bravado in the face of the American threats. Describing the conflict between the United States and Islam as “the battle of good and evil,” he urged his followers to attack Americans wherever and whenever it proved possible. They “should not consult anyone in the matter of killing Americans,” he said. “Combating the devil does not require a fatwa, nor consultation, nor does it require prayer to Allah. They are the party of Satan, and fighting them is the obligation of the time.” In other portraits from 2010 and 2011, distributed through Al Qaeda’s channels and other jihadi forums, the nerdish American sought to project a more martial image, posing in a camouflage jacket with a Kalashnikov rifle or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. It was unlikely that this bookish intellectual would have been of much use in a real battle, but his pose had a dual appeal—to his jihad-minded followers wherever they might be and, closer to home, to Yemen’s well-armed tribes. Any tribesmen who by some unlikely chance happened to see the staged photos of Awlaki brandishing weapons might have smiled at his pretension, but they would also have appreciated his gesture. Now, he was saying, I am one of you.

  And to move around safely in the tribal region required a network of helpers, sympathizers, and what might be termed tolerators—those who were happy not to get involved. The main tribal provinces of Shabwah, Marib, and Al Jawf, where he was moving about, had a total population of well over one million people spread over territory nearly the size of North Carolina. Finding a fugitive was not easy even in far more favorable conditions: Eric Rudolph, for instance, who had bombed abortion clinics and the Atlanta Olympics, had evaded an intense manhunt in the mountains of western North Carolina for five years before he was caught in 2003. Awlaki had far more support, and he was hiding in far rougher terrain.

  American officials were getting a steady stream of intelligence about Awlaki, but it still fell short of the timeliness or specificity required to plan a strike. “I remember hearing—he’s in Shabwah, he’s in Marib, he’s here, he’s there. He’s doing this, doing that,” said an American counterterrorism official who closely followed the top-secret reports from the manhunt, most of them based on the NSA’s intercept of calls and e-mails among Al Qaeda supporters and tribesmen who had glimpsed him. Was Awlaki able to keep plotting while on the run? “I’m not even sure I would agree with the idea that he was on the run,” the official said. “He knew that he had to keep his profile down,” so he stayed off cell phones and limited his contact with outsiders. “But that doesn’t mean they’re moving from safe house to safe house every day.” After all, he said, a group of men on the move could draw unwanted attention.

  —

  As the momentous Arab Spring of 2011 arrived, intelligence agencies were still tracking the plots of AQAP in Yemen. But the ideological appeal of Al Qaeda seemed to many experts to be receding. The menace of fanatics lost the spotlight as thousands of idealistic young Muslims began to rise up against the American-backed dictators who had ruled Arab countries for decades. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria—and finally in Yemen—people were taking to the streets with demands that struck an American ear as reassuringly familiar: they demanded democratic government, freedom from confining traditions, an end to corruption. Not only were the protesters not repeating the sinister demands of Al Qaeda, as people massed in central squares in capital after capital, but there was hardly any mention of Islam at all. When Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, was forced to resign in ignominy on February 11, the canny crowds in the streets had accomplished what Al Qaeda had long dreamed of and had insisted could be accomplished only with violence. Osama bin Laden and the network he had built had been left on the sidelines, seemingly discredited and quite overtaken by events.

  President Obama caught the bracing promise of the drama in Cairo in remarks to the nation from the White House in reaction to Mubarak’s departure. “There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place,” Obama said. “This is one of those moments.” There would be “difficult days ahead,” the president acknowledged, but “Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.” It was an upbeat, celebratory speech, mentioning Gandhi, quoting Martin Luther King, and comparing the moment to the fall of the Berlin Wall. That combination may have seemed over the top, but it was a heady time. For people accustomed to exclusively bad news from the Middle East, here was a wave of heartening developments that could be understood in the comforting American vocabulary of freedom and democracy. The Muslims of the Middle East were not, it turned out, some alien race, perpetually troubled, obsessively religious, and depressingly prone to violence, as a decade’s news coverage had suggested to s
ome Americans. They had the same aspirations as people in the West and the rest of the world.

  A couple of weeks after the president spoke, I called a range of experts and found a striking consensus, albeit with some caveats, that Al Qaeda was being bypassed and rendered irrelevant by the rush of events. An old CIA hand, Paul Pillar, told me that “so far—and I emphasize so far—the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda. Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.” Brian Fishman, a younger scholar who followed the flood of Internet commentary in the Arab countries, noted that Ayman al-Zawahri, Bin Laden’s top deputy and Al Qaeda’s No. 2, had once been tortured by Mubarak’s government. “Knocking off Mubarak has been Zawahri’s goal for more than 20 years, and he was unable to achieve it. Now a nonviolent, nonreligious, pro-democracy movement got rid of him in a matter of weeks. It’s a major problem for Al Qaeda.”

  There were cautionary notes. In my article for the Times on Al Qaeda and the Arab awakening, I quoted a few jihadists who claimed to be enthralled with the uprisings and insisted that the revolution was just a stage in their drive for a caliphate ruled by Islamic law. A colleague talked to a veteran Jordanian militant who called himself Abu Khaled. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is,” he said. “We are certain that this will all play into our hands.” The iconoclastic former CIA Bin Laden specialist Michael Scheuer, always good for a contrarian view, sounded the same note. By focusing on westernized, English-speaking students and intellectuals among the Arab demonstrators, Scheuer told me, American journalists and pundits had completely misjudged the moment. Thousands of Islamists had been released from prisons in Egypt alone, he said, and the ouster of secular dictators would revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies. The terrorist group was highly opportunistic, and with the collapse of the old regimes “we’re looking over all at a more geographically widespread, probably numerically bigger and certainly more influential movement than in 2001,” Scheuer said.