Dirty Wars (5 page)

It would take some time—and
more than a dozen visits
to the CIA by Cheney and his chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby—to produce enough “evidence” of an active Iraqi WMD program to pull off their plans for an Iraq invasion. But, in the meantime, they had a war against government oversight and accountability to wage. The CIA and Special Forces campaign in Afghanistan was, in the beginning, a rout. While the Afghanistan war was producing spectacular headlines trumpeting the swiftness and decisiveness of the US military campaign against the weak Taliban government, Cheney and Rumsfeld and their neoconservative deputies were busy plotting a global war. This war would extend to the home front with warrantless wiretapping,
mass arrests
of Arabs, Pakistanis and other Muslim immigrants
and a prodigious rollback of the civil liberties of American citizens. To wage it, they would have to dismantle and manipulate a bureaucracy of oversight and legal review that had been built up over successive administrations. All this would open the door for an array of tactics that had been used before but could now be deployed on an unprecedented scale: covert action, black ops, secret prisons, snatch operations and what amounted to a blanket rebranding of assassinations as “High Value Targeting.”

COMING OUT OF THE REAGAN-BUSH ERA
, in which the institution of covert action was marred by the Iran-Contra scandal, President Clinton put in place more oversight mechanisms and created a
rigorous legal
system for approving lethal covert action. When Clinton or his national security adviser proposed a covert action, it would be passed through an internal oversight system: first to the CIA, where the Agency's general counsel would review its legality before passing it on for further review (and possibly proposed changes as a result of the legal review) to two separate CIA committees—the Covert Action Planning Group and the Covert Action Review Group. After those committees reviewed the proposed action and suggested alterations, it would go back to the CIA's general counsel for a final legal review and then would be passed back to the White House. There, it would be put before the Interagency Working Group for Covert Action, comprising representatives from various agencies within the executive branch. The group would analyze the potential consequences of the proposed covert action and, again, review its legality. After a final review by the heads and deputies of the relevant agencies, the action would be presented to the president for authorization. These actions were rarely approved.

When President Bush was sworn in early in 2001, his administration indicated it intended to keep many of those same checks and balances in place. National Security Presidential Directive-1 (NSPD-1), signed by Bush on February 13, 2001,
closely mirrored
the Clinton-era system for approving covert actions. But in March, Bush asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to request that the CIA “prepare a
new series of authorities
for covert action in Afghanistan.” Clarke and his CIA counterparts who ran the “bin Laden Unit” began laying out covert actions that could target al Qaeda, while the administration proposed beefing up the CIA's
counterterrorism funding
. Clarke pushed hard for a retaliatory strike against al Qaeda for the October 2000 bombing of the USS
Cole
off the coast of Yemen. As was the case under Clinton, many of the plans involved targeting al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan. At the end of May, Rice and
Tenet met with Clarke, Cofer Black and the bin Laden Unit chief to discuss “
taking the offensive
” against al Qaeda. The CIA was running disruption activities against bin Laden at the time, but the consensus of these officials was that they needed a plan for “breaking the back” of al Qaeda. They also endorsed covert aid to
Uzbekistan
but stopped short of offering any significant support to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban groups inside Afghanistan. In other words, they were continuing the Clinton-era approach to al Qaeda and Afghanistan, albeit with increased funding and focus.

A draft of a new Counterterrorism National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) was circulated in June. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley described the program to the 9/11 Commission as “
admittedly ambitious
,” outlining a multiyear effort involving “all instruments of national power,” including a far-reaching covert action program. But it would go through
five more meetings
at the deputy level before being presented to the principals. At one of these meetings, in August 2001, the NSC Deputies Committee had “
concluded
that it was legal for the CIA to kill bin Laden or one of his deputies” with a Predator drone strike.

Although the use of drones would eventually become one of the staples of the US targeted killing apparatus, before 9/11 there was great dissension on the topic in the ranks of Bush's counterterrorism team. In the last year of the Clinton administration, the United States
began flying drones
over Afghanistan out of a secret US base, called
K2
, in Uzbekistan. There was a program to create a weaponized drone under way, but it was
not yet operational
.
Cofer Black argued
that the drones should not even be used for reconnaissance, suggesting that the administration wait until they could be weaponized. He pointed out that a Predator had been spotted over Afghan territory in 2000, spurring the Taliban government to scramble MiG fighters. “I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator
in front of CNN
,” Black asserted. In the end, the administration decided to
shelve the use of the drones
for recon in Afghanistan until they could be loaded for strikes. But while Black, Clarke and others within the counterterrorism team pushed hard for the eventual use of the Predators to conduct targeted killing operations, the CIA's senior leadership expressed serious concerns about the Agency running such a program, echoing many of the concerns of the Clinton-era counterterrorism team about creating US hit lists. According to the 9/11 Commission, Tenet “in particular questioned whether he, as Director of Central Intelligence, should operate an armed Predator. ‘
This was new ground
,' he told us. Tenet ticked off key questions: What is the chain of command? Who takes the
shot? Are America's leaders comfortable with the CIA doing this, going outside of normal military command and control?” Charles Allen, who was the CIA's
assistant director for collection
from 1998 to 2005, said that he and the Agency's number-three man, A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, “had said that either one of them would be
happy to pull the trigger
, but Tenet was appalled,” adding that no CIA personnel had such authority to use drones to summarily assassinate people, even terrorists.

While these debates played out inside the Agency, it was not until a week before 9/11 that the Bush administration convened a meeting of “principals” to discuss the al Qaeda threat. At the
September 4 meeting
, a draft of the National Security Presidential Directive was officially presented and was approved “with little discussion” for presentation to Bush to sign. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice reportedly told President Bush that she thought it would take about
three years to implement
the ambitious program. On September 10, Hadley continued to press Director Tenet and the CIA to prepare draft legal authorities “for the ‘
broad covert action program
' envisioned by the draft presidential directive.” Hadley also instructed him to draw up findings “authorizing a broad range of other covert activities, including to capture or to use lethal force” against al Qaeda “command-and-control-elements.” According to the 9/11 Commission report, this section would overwrite Clinton-era documents and ought to be broad enough “to cover any additional [Osama bin Laden]-related covert actions contemplated.” Although the Bush administration was working to widen the scope of acceptable lethal force against bin Laden and his top deputies, the process was marked by the same concerns expressed during the Clinton era about granting sweeping lethal authority. The Bush White House was embarking on a path similar to the Clinton administration's, trying to circumvent the assassination ban while still requiring careful review of each proposed lethal operation.

On September 11, all of that would change.

As the World Trade Center towers crumbled to the ground, so too did the system of oversight and review of lethal covert ops that had been carefully constructed over the course of the previous decade.

“
ONLY A CRISIS
—actual or perceived—produces real change.” So wrote the conservative icon Milton Friedman in his book
Capitalism and Freedom.
Friedman was a key adviser to successive Republican administrations and held tremendous influence over many officials in the Bush White House. He had
mentored Rumsfeld
early in his career, and Cheney and the leading neocons in the administration regularly
sought his counsel
. Friedman
preached, “
When that crisis occurs
, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

For the senior officials in Bush's national security and defense teams who spent the eight Clinton years—and more—developing those alternatives, the 9/11 attacks, and almost unanimous support from the Democratic-controlled Congress, provided a tremendous opportunity to make their ideas inevitable. In an eerie prediction of things to come, the neocons of the Project for a New American Century had asserted a year to the month before 9/11 in their report, “Rebuilding America's Defenses,” that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like
a new Pearl Harbor
.” Cheney and Rumsfeld may not have been able to see 9/11 coming, but they proved masters at exploiting the attacks. “The 9/11 attack was one of those events in history potent enough to stimulate fresh thought and disturb the complacent,” recalled Feith. “It created an opportunity to give many people—friends and enemies, in the United States and abroad—a new perspective. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and I shared the view that the president had a
duty to use his bully pulpit
.”

Under the Constitution, it is the Congress, not the president, that has the right to declare war. But seventy-two hours after 9/11, Congress took a radical step in a different direction. On September 14, 2001, the House and Senate gave President Bush unprecedented latitude to wage a global war, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It stated that “the President is authorized to use
all necessary and appropriate force
against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” The use of the term “persons” in the authorization was taken by the administration as a green light for assassinations. It passed the House with only
one opposing vote
and the Senate with no dissent. The lone “Nay” vote against the AUMF came from liberal California Democrat Barbara Lee. “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must
urge the use of restraint
,” Lee declared, voice trembling, as she spoke on the floor of the House that day. “
There must be some of us
who say, let's step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today—let us more fully understand their consequences,” she added in her submitted remarks. “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.”
Lee's two-minute speech was the extent of any congressional push-back to the sweeping war powers and authority the White House was requesting.

Empowered by an overwhelming, bipartisan endorsement of a global, borderless war against a stateless enemy, the Bush administration declared the world a battlefield. We “have to work, though, sort of
the dark side
, if you will,” Dick Cheney proclaimed on NBC's
Meet the Press
on September 16, 2001, hinting at what was to come. “We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful.” The president publicly signed the AUMF into law on September 18, 2001, but it was the order he signed a day earlier in secret that was even more momentous. The
secret presidential directive
, which remains classified, granted the CIA authority to capture and hold suspected militants across the globe, which would lead to the creation of a network of what administration officials internally referred to as “black sites” that could be used to imprison and interrogate prisoners. The directive also wiped out the roadblocks of oversight and interagency review from the process of authorizing targeted killings. Perhaps most significantly, it ended the practice of the president signing off on each lethal, covert operation. The administration's lawyers concluded that the ban on assassinations did not apply to people it classified as “terrorists,” and it gave great latitude to the CIA for authorizing kill operations on the go. In the beginning, President Bush wanted the CIA to take the lead. He had just the man for the job.

COFER BLACK
spent much of his career in the shadows in Africa. He cut his CIA teeth in Zambia during the Rhodesian War and then in
Somalia and South Africa
during the apartheid regime's brutal war against the black majority. During his time in
Zaire
, Black worked on the Reagan administration's covert weapons program to arm anti-Communist forces in Angola. In the early 1990s, long before most in the counterterrorism community, Black became obsessed with bin Laden and declared him a major threat who needed to be neutralized. From 1993 to 1995, Black worked, under diplomatic cover, at the US Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, where he served as
CIA station chief
. Bin Laden was also in Sudan, building up his international network into what the CIA would describe at the end of Black's tour as “
the Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism
.” Black's agents, who were tracking bin Laden, worked under a Clinton-era “
operating directive
” that restricted them to intelligence collection on bin Laden and his network. Black wanted the authority to kill the Saudi billionaire, but
the Clinton White House had
not yet signed
the lethal findings it eventually did after the 1998 African embassy bombings. “Unfortunately, at that time permissions to kill—officially called Lethal Findings—were
taboo in the outfit
,” said CIA operative Billy Waugh, who worked closely with Black in Sudan. “In the early 1990s we were forced to adhere to the sanctimonious legal counsel and the do-gooders.” Among Waugh's rejected ideas was allegedly a plot to kill bin Laden in Khartoum and
dump his body
at the Iranian Embassy in an effort to pin the blame on Tehran, an idea Waugh said Cofer Black “loved.”