Objective Troy

by Scott Shane

  One factor in the dark portrayal of drones was that stories trump facts in the human imagination, and drone strikes produced compelling stories. The outrage that drones often produced was a visceral reaction to the creepiness of flying killer robots and to the arrogance of casually invading another country’s airspace. But it was also a matter of scale. Saturation bombing in the style of World War II or Vietnam, or ground invasions of cities like Fallujah in Iraq, produced statistics, not stories; when the number of dead climbed into the thousands, individual tales got lost. Drone strikes, with tolls of two or five or ten, were far easier to grasp and retell as detailed personal accounts. By 2013, survivors of drone strikes began to visit Washington with the support of human rights groups, offering devastating accounts of strikes gone wrong.

  Henry Crumpton, a CIA veteran who had been in on the early experiments with armed drones, claimed that the intense focus on civilians killed in drone strikes was, paradoxically, an encouraging sign of human progress. Those who planned the first drone strikes were driven not by humanitarian concerns but by the mission of killing Bin Laden and a few lieutenants, Crumpton admitted: “We never said, ‘Let’s build a more humane weapon.’ ” But he argued that the small scale of drone killing was producing growing intolerance for the routine mass slaughter of earlier wars. “Look at the firebombing of Dresden, and compare what we’re doing today,” Crumpton said. “The public’s expectations have been raised dramatically around the world, and that’s good news.” Drone critics found Crumpton’s view Panglossian; if Dresden was the measure, after all, almost any act of war might look less murderous.

  But the numbers did not lie. By comparison with the two big ground wars Obama had inherited, the toll of noncombatants killed in drone strikes was very small—hundreds, versus hundreds of thousands. “I think he understands that you can’t eliminate civilian casualties entirely when you’re using violence against people,” Ben Rhodes told me, as Obama neared the end of his sixth year in office. “But I do think he still believes strongly that this is a very important tool that has been hugely successful, particularly in the effort against the Al Qaeda core in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in disrupting AQAP in Yemen.” Obama, Rhodes said, “believes these drones strikes have prevented attacks, and it’s impossible to weigh the counterfactual”—that is, to be certain about what might have happened without the drones. “He has very complicated thoughts about all this,” Rhodes said. Battered in the press and condemned by many of his progressive political allies, Obama nevertheless steadfastly believed that drones were the least terrible strategy at his disposal to defend the country against terrorism.

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  Awlaki and Obama would be linked forever, the first American deliberately killed by his own government without a court’s judgment, and the president who gave the order. But the third player in their lethal drama, the drone itself, seemed ready to escape its martial origins. True, other countries were imitating the United States and building their own fleets of armed drones, a development that increasingly worried Obama, his aides said. It seemed only a matter of time before Russia used drones to kill, say, Chechen rebels hiding in Georgia, or China sent unmanned aircraft loaded with missiles after Uighur separatists operating from Kazakhstan. Some unlucky State Department spokesman, instructed to condemn the strikes, was going to have the impossible task of distinguishing them from the hundreds already carried out by the United States.

  By midway through Obama’s second term, however, a growing cast of hobbyists and entrepreneurs were at work finding civilian uses for drones. Some drone evangelists were determined to liberate remotely piloted aircraft from their dark origins in the hands of the CIA and JSOC. One of them, a polymath named Chris Anderson, drew an analogy with the Internet, which had begun life as a Pentagon research project and had grown into a universal servant to humankind with overwhelmingly civilian and benign uses. Anderson had left his job as editor of Wired magazine to devote his time to a website he had created, diydrones.com, “The Leading Community for Personal UAVs,” and to serve as CEO of a manufacturer of small drones, 3D Robotics. He discovered a huge demand from farmers for small drones with cameras and other sensors, which could survey a huge acreage and report back on the need for water or fertilizer, harvesting, or help for livestock in trouble. “You can literally just toss a drone in the air, and by the time you’re done with your breakfast you have great data on the state of your crops,” Anderson told me. Power companies were inspecting their lines with drones. Real estate agents were dazzling customers with overhead video of high-end houses. Police departments were studying how they might be used for timely highway accident reporting or to safely survey hostage situations. Amazon and other retailers began to talk about package delivery by drone.

  Anderson said 3D Robotics alone was already selling each calendar quarter about as many drones—7,500 or so—as there were in the entire American military fleet. But his craft were much smaller and much cheaper. The same technologies that had made the smart phone possible—GPS, sensors, high-quality miniature cameras—now were being borrowed by the drone industry. If hobbyists’ drones struck some people as expensive toys with limited practical value, well, that was what many had said about the earliest personal computers. “People will find new uses, just as we did for the personal computer,” Anderson said. “One way or another, the sky’s going to be dark with these things. The only question is whether they’ll be made by Boeing or by small entrepreneurs.”

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  For anyone who spent his days thinking about terrorists and the agencies that went after them, talking to an upbeat enthusiast like Anderson was a blessed relief. It was possible to imagine a country, and a world, less obsessed by violence and counterviolence, by an alien ideology and the overheated jingoism of the response. In 2011, it seemed quite plausible that Al Qaeda and the era it had defined in American life were finally receding into history. The terrorist network in Pakistan was so reduced that it was incapable of large-scale plotting, and AQAP had distinguished itself mainly by failed attacks. The crowds on the streets of Cairo, Tunis, Sanaa, and other Arab capitals were calling for jobs and elections, not for jihad.

  It was nice while it lasted.

  By 2013, Awlaki’s prediction two years earlier, in his Inspire article “The Tsunami of Change,” was coming true: the most extreme and violent Islamist organizations were gaining adherents and energy from the Arab awakening, which ended in many places in disillusionment or violent crackdowns. Much of the unrest began to take on a sectarian, Sunni versus Shia cast, or to pit tribes and militias against one another. There was no longer much talk of democracy.

  And then, from the chaos and suffering of Syria, arose the monstrous offspring of the Iraq war and the Arab Spring, calling itself at first the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or Syria. The group broke with Al Qaeda, whose leaders found it disobedient and reckless in its violence. Tasting success, it rebranded itself as simply the Islamic State, claiming to be the core of a new Islamic caliphate that would eventually incorporate all the world’s Muslims, and then all the world.

  The So-Called Islamic State—the phrase came to serve almost as an official title in the Western media—was medieval in its ideology and brutal in its tactics but up to the technological moment in its propaganda. Bin Laden, recording VHS tapes with Arabic verses and obscure allusions that were couriered to Al Jazeera for broadcast, had been the first generation of jihadi agitprop. Awlaki, with his accessible, colloquial English, fast to take advantage of blogging, Facebook, and YouTube, had represented the second generation. But the Islamic State was online jihad 3.0, I wrote in The New York Times. It operated in multiple languages, took full advantage of Twitter, used drones to film its battles from the sky, and produced recruitment videos of frightening sophistication and appeal.

  In December 2013, a new, English-language Islamic State video featured a voice familiar to anyone who had followed jihad on the Internet. “Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki,” said the subtitle, a
nd a familiar portrait appeared in the corner of the screen. In the recording, from a lecture he had given by phone in May 2008 to a conference in South Africa, Awlaki hailed the announcement two years earlier of the Islamic State of Iraq, the predecessor of the group now calling itself the Islamic State. The upstart Islamic State used his words for the jihadi equivalent of a celebrity endorsement. What Awlaki had said then, shortly after his release from prison in Yemen, needed no updating. “Now, whether the state survives to expand into the next Muslim caliphate or is destroyed by the immense conspiracy against the rise of any Islamic state, I believe this to be a monumental event,” Awlaki said. “It represents a move of the idea from the theoretical realm to the real world. The idea of establishing the Islamic rule and establishing caliphate on earth now is not anymore talk—it is action!” A Syrian activist group claimed that the Islamic State had created an “Anwar al-Awlaki Battallion” of English-speaking fighters to be dispatched to carry out attacks in the West.

  Many of the Westerners who headed to Syria to fight with the jihadists—or were stopped on the way—inevitably turned out to be Awlaki devotees. An American who carried out a suicide bombing for the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, left behind a video interview in which he cited Awlaki twice for giving him the courage to join the jihad. Shannon Conley, a nineteen-year-old Muslim convert from Colorado arrested as she tried to fly to Turkey to join the Islamic State, left behind a pile of CDs and DVDs of Awlaki’s lectures. After two French-Algerian brothers burst into the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and murdered a dozen people in January 2015, they repeatedly trumpeted their connection to AQAP and to Awlaki. “I, Chérif Kouachi, was sent by Al Qaeda in Yemen,” the younger brother told a television reporter. “I went there, and it was Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki who financed me.” More than three years had passed since Awlaki’s death, and the claim at first seemed dubious. But intelligence officials believed it was true. A week after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a twenty-year-old Ohio man was arrested after allegedly scheming with an FBI informant to set off pipe bombs at the US Capitol. He had sent an instant message to his coconspirator, the charging papers said, asserting that “Anwar al-Awlaki before his martyrdom” had given “a thumbs up” to such attacks. The very next day, prosecutors in Florida announced new charges for two Pakistan-born naturalized citizens, also fans of Awlaki, who were accused of studying the bomb-making instruction in Inspire magazine and hunting for targets in New York City.

  The pile-up of plotters who considered Awlaki their posthumous mentor was astonishing. But by then the number of YouTube videos accessible via a search of “Awlaki” had climbed to eighty thousand. A study by the New America Foundation in 2014 found that eighteen people indicted in the United States after Awlaki’s death on terrorism-related charges—and fifty-two since 9/11—either cited his influence or possessed his materials, a total that kept climbing.

  When Awlaki was killed in 2011, it had seemed possible that his benighted cause was dying as well. But now, with the emergence of the Islamic State, that cause had blazed up again with new force and on a much larger scale. The group was flush with cash from oil wells and kidnappings and armed with American heavy weapons captured from fleeing Iraqi troops. Awlaki’s ideology, and the recruitment pitch that he had made with such brazen effectiveness, now became a model for the Islamic State, to disastrous effect. Awlaki’s seeming daydreams about a caliphate returning one hundred years after the Ottoman Empire’s fall were proving, if not real, devastatingly attractive to some young Muslims. In the face of this fresh horror, Obama’s strategy against terrorism faltered.

  The American president who had believed he was cutting the terrorist enemy down to size, freeing the country and the culture to focus on domestic challenges, now was forced to shift his policy. His dream of establishing new, positive relations with the Muslim world lay in tatters. The vaunted precision of the drone was not up to the task of taking on an army of well-armed fanatics occupying huge swaths of Syria and Iraq. His reluctance and dismay obvious, Obama committed the United States to a new, long war in the Middle East. It began in September 2014 with air strikes and advisers, and it was hard to say when or how it would end. Surely Awlaki would have been heartened that the native country he so despised, having given him the martyrdom he claimed to seek, was being drawn still deeper into the battles within Islam.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book is a river with many tributaries. I owe many people, and I will live in fear that they will someday try to collect on the debts. Steve Luxenberg took time from his own book labors to give me useful counsel at every stage and provided invaluable notes on the entire manuscript. With uncommon generosity, Francie Weeks, Suse Shane, Matt Watkins, Rich Krohn, and Robert Schwartz read various drafts, lassoing mistakes and directing improvements. I urge readers with complaints to hunt them down and ask them why, exactly, they couldn’t get me to do a better job.

  Thanks to Mark Kende, professor of law at Drake University, for helping organize an informal survey of constitutional law professors; J. M. Berger of Intelwire, as well as Judicial Watch, for making public documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; Medea Benjamin for sharing her interview with Nasser al-Awlaki; Kristen Wilhelm of the National Archives for helping me break loose a long-secret document from the 9/11 Commission; Rita Katz and Adam Raisman of the SITE Intelligence Group and Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on Terrorism for helping track down old Awlaki lectures and statements; Susan Schmidt for sharing her documents on Awlaki in 2010; Souad Mekhennet for her superb work interviewing former Awlaki students in London in 2010; my colleague Jo Becker for reporting with me on Obama’s counterterrorism record in 2012; Martha Shane for capturing still images from videos; Paul Cruickshank and Morten Storm for sharing photos; Bob Cronan for producing an illuminating Yemen map; Rebecca and Tim More for providing a desk and Wi-Fi at a critical moment. My wonderful in-laws, Bill and Frances Weeks, gave unstinting support, whether I deserved it or not. My sister-in-law, Margie Weeks, contributed a crucial hunt for typos.

  Mohammed Albasha, of the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, has been a reliable guide to his fascinating and long-suffering country, and I thank him for supporting my visa request. In Yemen, where I had an unforgettable reporting visit, shukran especially to Farea al-Muslimi and Adam Baron for providing accommodations, advice, an introduction to qat-chewing, and help with reporting. Walid Abdulrahman got me places and kept me safe. Shuaib Almosawa and Hamed Sanabani rounded up photos. As readers will recognize, Dr. Nasser al-Awlaki and Ammar al-Awlaki were immensely helpful, both in making sure I got my facts straight and showing me that Anwar ultimately took the path of terror in spite of, not because of, his family.

  I’m grateful to Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser, for giving the Obama administration’s account of the Awlaki story, and to all the current and former government officials who spoke with me. Many will be relieved I am not thanking them by name. My research for this book has, alas, underscored just how far the federal government has drifted from the openness that is the lifeblood of democracy and that a new president promised in 2009. A central finding of the 9/11 Commission—that excessive secrecy, not excessive transparency, made the country vulnerable to attack—has been forgotten. Reporting on national security has been made more difficult by the Obama administration’s unprecedented campaign to imprison officials who share even innocuous classified information with the press. Two former high-ranking officials whose recollections would have been invaluable chose not to talk—understandably, because they were already under FBI investigation for other disclosures. The administration fought to keep secret the legal opinions guiding its use of targeted killing; only after four years of litigation did the courts finally order their partial release. The US Bureau of Prisons blocked my attempts to correspond with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Zachary Chesser. The FBI and CIA declined all interview requests, though both agencies answered a few written
questions. In this atmosphere of exaggerated secrecy, many people who talked did so on condition of anonymity.

  The New York Times has been a supportive home for the last decade and granted me a year’s leave to write this book. Many thanks to Dean Baquet, now the executive editor, who as Washington bureau chief in 2010 first suggested that I take a deeper look at Awlaki, and whose enthusiasm for good stories is infectious; to Rebecca Corbett, assistant managing editor, a mentor and pal at the Baltimore Sun and the Times, who has spent twenty years teaching me to make every story better; to Bill Hamilton, the national security editor, a wise man who understands the crucial role of humor on deadline; to David McCraw and his assistants, who fought successfully in court to obtain long-secret documents; and to my terrific colleagues on the national security beat and in the bureau, including Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, Helene Cooper, Eric Lichtblau, Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker, David Sanger, Eric Lipton, Mark Landler, Michael Gordon, Jim Risen, Peter Baker, Michael Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo, Jennifer Steinhauer, Ron Nixon, and Jason DeParle. I’ve benefited hugely from the Yemen reporting of Bobby Worth and Laura Kasinof. I have learned a lot from several superb books that have covered the United States’s battles with terrorism and sometimes with itself, notably Mark Mazzetti’s The Way of the Knife, Daniel Klaidman’s Kill or Capture, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s Counterstrike, Seth Jones’s Hunting in the Shadows, Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, and Michelle Shephard’s Decade of Fear. My agent, Larry Weissman, gave me crucial help in honing the idea for this book. At Crown, my first editor, Vanessa Mobley, completed an insightful edit before departing for Little, Brown. Tim Duggan picked up where she left off and has been an enthusiastic champion for the book. Thanks to Claire Potter and Thomas Gebremedhin for patiently explaining the intricacies of publishing, and to Andy Young for giving the book a thorough fact-check.