Dirty Wars (16 page)

As part of the operation, the CIA had launched an
MQ-1 Predator drone
from its outpost in Djibouti into Yemen's airspace. But this wasn't just a spy drone—it was armed with two antitank Hellfire missiles. The drone was under the operational control of the CIA's highly secretive Special Activities Division and a
live video feed
from the drone was piped into the Counterterrorism Center in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the command center in Djibouti. “Now we were involved in a
high-speed Predator chase
,” according to DeLong.

The video feed from the drone showed Harithi and his cohorts
driving off in a convoy
at dawn in their dusty Toyota Land Cruiser, one hundred miles outside of Sana'a. The men were driving through Marib, where the US ambassador was scheduled to visit the following day. As the convoy circled the Yemeni desert, Harithi's driver shouted into a satellite phone, speaking to a man with whom the al Qaeda operatives were supposed to rendezvous. “
We're right over here
,” he yelled. Intelligence analysts determined that Harithi's voice could be heard in the background giving instructions to the driver and that the drone had a solid lock on the jeep. “Our
intel says that's him,” DeLong said to CIA director George Tenet, as they both monitored the live feed from their respective locations. “One of them is an American—the fat guy. But he's al Qaeda.”

Tenet called Saleh and informed him that he was going to give the go-ahead for the strike. Saleh consented but was emphatic that the mission be kept secret. Tenet agreed. “
We didn't want publicity
, either,” DeLong recalled. “If questions did arise, the official Yemeni version would be that an SUV carrying civilians accidentally hit a land mine in the desert and exploded. There was to be no mention of terrorists, and no mention of missiles fired.”

Once the formalities were taken care of, Tenet gave the green light for action. A five-foot-long Hellfire missile slammed into the jeep, blowing it up. One passenger survived the strike and managed to crawl about
twenty-five yards
before collapsing and dying. As the jeep's remnants continued to burn in the desert, a CIA operative went to examine the aftermath of the strike and to obtain
DNA samples
from the dead. A few days later, it was revealed that among those killed in the strike was Ahmed Hijazi, also known as Kamal Derwish, a
US citizen
born in Buffalo, New York. After the attack, US officials publicly tied Hijazi to what they described as a terror cell in Buffalo, known as the “Lackawanna Six.” Hijazi had been named as an
unindicted co-conspirator
in the alleged plot of six Yemeni Americans to provide material support to al Qaeda. Civil liberties organizations alleged that the men had been encouraged and ultimately entrapped by the FBI. The men had been arrested two months before Hijazi's killing. FBI investigators in the case alleged that Hijazi was a “
card carrying member
of al Qaeda” who was helping to run a sleeper cell in Buffalo.

A day after the drone strike, President Bush was in Arkansas stumping for Republican candidates in the midterm congressional elections. Without specifically mentioning the strike, Bush sent a message about his strategy against al Qaeda operatives around the world. “The only way to treat them is [as] what they are—
international killers
,” Bush declared. “And the only way to find them is to be patient, and steadfast, and hunt them down. And the United States of America is doing just that.”

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deflected questions about the US role in the strike, saying only that if Harithi was killed, “it would be a very good thing if he were
out of business
.” When pressed on the extent of US operations in Yemen, Rumsfeld would only say, “We have some folks in that country,” adding, “I'm not going to get into the arrangements we have with the government of Yemen, other than to say what I said.”

While the Bush administration characterized the attack that killed Hijazi
and Harithi as a successful takedown of a dangerous high-value target, unnamed officials revealed in multiple media outlets that it was a US operation but said they were reluctant to discuss the US role because of the damage it could do to Saleh's government. “Most governments aren't keen on the idea of U.S. hit squads or unmanned Predators roaming their country, executing summary justice,” reported
Newsweek
, adding that Saleh had given the United States “consent to go after Al Qaeda with its own
high-tech resources
.” But then, on November 5, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, openly confirmed it was a US strike, angering Saleh as well as the CIA. “It's a very
successful tactical operation
, and one hopes each time you get a success like that, not only to have gotten rid of somebody dangerous, but to have imposed changes in their tactics and operations and procedures,” Wolfowitz declared on CNN. “And sometimes when people are changing, they expose themselves in new ways. So, we've just got to keep the pressure on everywhere we're able to, and we've got to deny the sanctuaries everywhere we're able to, and we've got to put pressure on every government that is giving these people support to get out of that business.”

Saleh was described as being “
highly pissed
” at the disclosure. “This is going to cause
major problems
for me,” Saleh complained to General Tommy Franks, the commander of CENTCOM. “This is why
it is so difficult
to make deals with the United States,” said Yemeni brigadier general Yahya M. al Mutawakel. “They don't consider the internal circumstances in Yemen.” To the American intel and special ops community, which had cooked up a cover story with Saleh's government to blame the hit on a
truck bomb
or a land mine, this was infuriating. But not everyone was displeased. When Senator Robert Graham, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was asked if the drone attack was “a precursor of more to come,” he replied bluntly, “
I hope so
.”

The targeted assassination of a US citizen away from the declared battlefield of Afghanistan sparked outrage from civil liberties and human rights groups. It was the first publicly confirmed targeted killing by the United States outside a battlefield since Gerald Ford implemented a ban on political assassinations in 1976. “If this was the
deliberate killing
of suspects in lieu of arrest in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law,” declared Amnesty International in a letter to President Bush. “The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions in any circumstances, and that any US officials found to be involved in such actions will be brought to justice.”

Far from issuing such a statement, the Bush administration not only owned the operation but pushed back hard, asserting its right under US law to kill people it designated as terrorists in any country, even if they were US citizens. “I can assure you that no
constitutional questions
are raised here,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Fox News a week after the attack. “The president has given broad authority to U.S. officials in a variety of circumstances to do what they need to do to protect the country. We're in a new kind of war, and we've made very clear that it is important that this new kind of war be fought on different battlefields.” She added, “It's broad authority.”

The targeted killing didn't just grab the attention of human rights groups. “To the extent you do more and more of this, it begins to look like it is policy,” said the CIA's former general counsel, Jeffrey Smith. If used regularly, such attacks would “suggest that it's acceptable behavior to assassinate people....
Assassination as a norm
of international conduct exposes American leaders and Americans overseas.”

In addition to launching a new kind of war in Yemen and the surrounding region, the drone strike that killed Hijazi would prove to be a precedent for Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who nearly a decade later asserted the right of the US government to kill another US citizen in Yemen.

In the bigger picture, the 2002 Predator drone strike in Yemen was a seminal moment in the war on terror. It was the first time the CIA's armed version of the Predator drone was used to attack al Qaeda
outside Afghanistan
. “It means the
rules of engagement
have changed,” an ex-CIA official familiar with special operations told the
Los Angeles Times.
The attack was an early salvo in the US government's new borderless war. “The
best way
to keep America safe from terrorism is to go after terrorists where they plan and hide,” President Bush said in his weekly radio address after the drone strike. “And that work goes on around the world.” Bush reasserted that he had “deployed troops” in Yemen but emphasized they were only there in a training capacity.

As Bush spoke, plans were under way to put the new “world is a battlefield” doctrine into practice. In late 2002, US military and intelligence personnel worked around the clock
upgrading and expanding
Camp Lemonnier on the outskirts of Djibouti's airport, preparing it for its role as a clandestine base of operations for JSOC and other special operations teams to strike at will against targets in Yemen and Somalia deemed to be terrorists under President Bush's sweeping parameters of what constituted a combatant in the war on terror. On December 12, Donald Rumsfeld paid a surprise visit to the base as it was still under construction. “We need to be
where the action is
,” Rumsfeld told several hundred soldiers dressed in
military fatigues. “There's no question but that this part of the world is an area where there's action.” He continued, “There are a number of terrorists, for example, just across the water in Yemen,” declaring, “These are serious problems.” That day, a US Army spokesman at Camp Lemonnier was asked if any missions had been launched from the new US base. “None that are conventional enough that
we can speak about
,” he replied. On December 13, the base officially became
fully operational
.

The US force in Djibouti was bolstered by
more than four hundred soldiers
and sailors aboard the USS
Mount Whitney
, a command-and-control ship sailing the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden. Its official mission: detect, disorganize, defeat and deny terrorist groups posing an imminent threat to coalition partners in the region. “We're coming, we're hunting,
we're relentless
,” declared the
Whitney
's senior officer, US marine major general John Sattler. His warship would help coordinate a covert US offensive encompassing Somalia, Yemen, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti and Sudan. As Sattler spoke, in December 2002, his ship was decorated with paper Santas and other
Christmas decorations
, as well as a portrait of Osama bin Laden riddled with bullet holes. He described his mission as hunting terrorist leaders fleeing Afghanistan and heading to Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in the region. “
If they stumble
, we'll bring them to justice. Even if they don't stumble, if they sleep a little too early one night or a little too late one morning, we'll be there.”

Sattler refused to confirm his forces were involved in the November 2002 drone strike but said, “If I were a terrorist, and I thought I was happily driving down the road with my terrorist buddies, and all of a sudden—with no warning—I cease to exist, I would be looking left, right and, now, up, because we're out there.” On December 22, Sattler
met with President Saleh
and other senior Yemeni officials in Sana'a. The US Embassy would not comment at the time about the meetings. The Yemeni government said only that the officials had discussed “
coordination
” in the “war against terrorism.” At the time, the
New York Times
characterized the views of a senior Bush administration official on Yemen: “As long as Mr. Saleh allows the C.I.A. to fly pilotless Predator drones over Yemeni territory and cooperates with American Special Forces and C.I.A. teams
hunting for Qaeda members
,” the administration would continue to back the Yemeni president.

The lethal US drone attack in Yemen and the construction of the base in Djibouti presaged an era of “direct action” by US counterterrorism forces in the region. “
Needless to say
a year ago, we weren't here,” Rumsfeld said at Camp Lemonnier. “I suspect that if we looked out one or two or three or four years we would find that this facility would be here.” In addition
to the conventional US military forces building up around Yemen and the Horn of Africa, US Special Operations Forces, including troops from JSOC, discreetly based at the time in Qatar and Kenya, were put on standby for more clandestine incursions into Yemen and its neighbor across the Gulf of Aden, Somalia. Although the CIA would take the lead in many of the future US operations in the region, it was a key moment in the rise of US Special Operations Forces, particularly JSOC, to a position of unprecedented influence within the US national security apparatus.

WASHINGTON, DC
, 2002—By 2002, the fight between the CIA and the Pentagon for supremacy over the global US fight against terrorism was itself beginning to resemble a small war. On April 17, the
Washington Post
ran a front-page story alleging that US military forces had allowed Osama bin Laden to escape after being injured at Tora Bora in Afghanistan in December 2001, asserting in its lead paragraph that it was the “
gravest error
in the war against al Qaeda.” Rumsfeld was furious and believed that Cofer Black, then the counterterrorism chief at the CIA, had been the “
deep background
” source for the story. A month later, Black was “
assigned to another position
” at a CIA satellite office in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Some charged that it was
Rumsfeld who had Black fired
. Still, the CIA's Operations Directorate and the Counterterrorism Center were forging ahead with Cheney's black ops campaign globally.
Black was replaced
at the CTC by Jose Rodriguez, who, like his predecessor, was a
zealous promoter
of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and secret CIA “black sites.” But the Agency's analytical division was a different animal.