Dirty Wars (67 page)

Well-placed special operations sources told me that among the countries where JSOC teams had been deployed under the Obama administration were: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Baluchistan) and the Philippines. These teams also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC was also supporting US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. But the two greatest priorities outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan were Yemen and Somalia. “In both those places, there are
ongoing unilateral actions
,” a Special Operations source told me in 2010.

One senior military official told the
Washington Post
that the Obama administration had given the green light for “
things that the previous administration
did not.” Special Operations commanders, the paper reported, had more direct communication with the White House than they did under Bush. “We have a lot more access,” a military official told the paper. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.” Under Obama, Hunter told me, JSOC was able to hit “harder, faster, quicker, with the full support of the White House.”

While the Obama administration ratcheted up its drone strikes and targeted killing campaign, al Qaeda affiliates were growing stronger, emboldened in part by the US escalation. Although the Obama administration boasted that it had al Qaeda on the ropes, its global assassination program was becoming a recruitment device for the very forces the United States claimed to be destroying.

YEMEN
, 2010—In early February 2010, AQAP leader Said Ali al Shihri, whom the Yemenis had claimed to have killed multiple times, released an audiotape. “
We advise you
, our people in the Peninsula, to prepare and carry your weapons and to defend your religion and yourselves and to join your mujahideen brothers,” he declared, adding that US “espionage planes,” presumably drones, had been killing women and children.

On March 14, the
United States struck again
. Air strikes hit Abyan in southern Yemen, killing two alleged AQAP operatives, including its southern chief, Jamil al Anbari. As it did after the al Majalah bombing, Yemen took credit for a US attack while Washington remained silent. AQAP leader Qasim al Rimi confirmed the deaths in an audio recording released soon after the strikes. “
A US strike targeted our brother
,” he declared. “The attack was carried out while our brother Jamil was making a phone call via the Internet.” As for Yemen's claims to have carried out the strike, Rimi said, “This nonsense is similar to their allegations” in the December 2009 strikes. “May God disgrace lying and liars.” A few months later, AQAP would avenge the deaths by launching a brazen attack against a government security compound in Aden, killing eleven people. The claim of responsibility was signed: “
Brigade of the martyr
Jamil al-Anbari.”

A week after the March 14 strike, one of the key US officials running the Obama administration's covert war in Yemen, Michael Vickers, accompanied then-undersecretary of defense for intelligence James Clapper for talks with President Saleh and other Yemeni officials. The US Embassy released a brief statement on the meeting, saying only that they were there “to discuss the
ongoing counterterrorism cooperation
” between the two countries and “to express the appreciation of the United States for Yemen's continuing efforts to counter” AQAP. A month later, Vickers gave a
closed-door briefing
to the Senate Armed Services Committee on covert US action in Yemen and Somalia. An
internal e-mail
circulated within Vickers's office at the time, and provided to me in confidence, acknowledged that “a task force operating in Yemen has helped Yemeni forces kill terrorism suspects, but it has also carried out unilateral operations,” adding: “The intelligence community, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and
the Central Intelligence Agency vets the lists of targets and decides who needs to be captured for the purposes of intelligence collection, or who can be killed.”

While JSOC forces continued to operate inside Yemen, at times training Yemeni forces and, at others, conducting kinetic actions, the air strikes continued. In late May, General James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, briefed President Obama on a High Value Target that JSOC had a lock on. The
president green-lit a strike
. On May 24, a US missile hit
a convoy of vehicles
in the Marib Desert that “actionable intelligence” had concluded was heading to a meeting of al Qaeda operatives. The intelligence was only partly correct. The men inside the vehicle were not al Qaeda members but prominent Yemeni local mediators in the government effort to demilitarize members of AQAP. Among those killed was Jabir al Shabwani, the deputy governor of Marib Province. Shabwani was in a key position to negotiate, given that
his cousin Ayad
was the local AQAP leader whom US and Yemeni forces had tried to take out in a pair of strikes in January. Shabwani's uncle and two of his escorts were also killed in the attack. A local official said the “deputy governor was
on a mediation mission
to persuade al-Qaeda elements to hand themselves over to the authorities.”

As in the cases of the other US strikes, the Yemeni authorities took public responsibility, and Yemen's
Supreme Security Council apologized
for what it said was a government raid gone wrong. But this hit came with much higher stakes because the attack killed one of their own people. Within hours of the attack, Shabwani's tribe
attacked the main oil pipeline
running from Marib to the Ras Isa port on the Red Sea coast. The tribesmen also attempted to take over the presidential palace in the province but were repelled by Yemeni army forces and tanks. Yemeni lawmakers demanded that Saleh's government explain how the strike happened and who was really behind the widening aerial war in Yemen.

Months after the attack, some US officials began to believe that the Saleh regime had actually fed the United States bad intelligence to take out Shabwani, after a political feud had broken out between Jabir al Shabwani and “key members” of President Saleh's family. “
We think we got played
,” a US source with access to “high-level” Obama administration discussions on Yemen said. The White House, the US military and the US ambassador to Yemen had all approved the strike. “It turned out you didn't really know who was at all those [Yemeni] meetings,” a former US intelligence official told the
Wall Street Journal
. A former US official told the paper the strike showed that the United States was “too susceptible to the Yemenis saying, ‘Oh, that's a bad guy, you go get him.' And it's a political bad guy—it's not a real bad, bad guy.” Brennan was reportedly “pissed” about the strike.
“
How could this have happened
?” Obama later demanded of General Cartwright. The general told him it was bad intel from the Yemenis. Cartwright said he “got a pretty good chest-thumping from the commander-in-chief.”

After the Tomahawk cruise missile strikes that killed scores of civilians in al Majalah in December 2009 and the disastrous strike that killed Shabwani, the CIA began agitating for a
shift from JSOC's Tomahawk strikes
to the CIA's weapon of choice: drones. Surveillance satellites were repositioned, and more Predator drones were deployed in secret bases near Yemen. “
The drones are flying over Marib
every twenty-four hours and there is not a day that passes that we don't see them,” said Sheikh Ibrahim al Shabwani, another brother of the government mediator who was killed in the May 25 strike. “Occasionally they fly at a lower altitude while at other times they fly at a higher altitude. The atmosphere has become weary because of the presence of US drones and fear that they could strike at any time.” Stoking such insecurity seemed a central part of the emerging US strategy aimed at making it lethally dangerous for local tribes to support AQAP. But to some it seemed to be backfiring, particularly with local tribal leaders who often had family members on various sides of the war.

Some reports alleged that, far from having intended to get Shabwani killed, Saleh, who depended on tribes to support his regime, demanded a pause in US covert actions as a result of the strike. But US officials insisted that it did not shake the covert arrangement allowing the United States to strike inside Yemen. “
At the end of the day
, it's not like he said, ‘No more,'” an unnamed Obama administration official told the
New York Times
. “He didn't kick us out of the country.”

What cannot be disputed is that the strikes, especially those that killed civilians and important tribal figures, were giving valuable ammunition to al Qaeda for its recruitment campaign in Yemen and its propaganda battle against the US-Yemen counterterrorism alliance. Yemeni government officials said the
series of US strikes
from December 2009 to May 2010 had killed more than two hundred civilians and forty people affiliated with al Qaeda. “
It is incredibly dangerous
what the US is trying to do in Yemen at the moment because it really fits into AQAP's broader strategy, in which it says Yemen is not different from Iraq and Afghanistan,” asserted Princeton professor Gregory Johnsen in June 2010, after Amnesty International released a report documenting the use of US munitions in the Yemen strikes. “They are able to make the argument that Yemen is a legitimate front for jihad,” said Johnsen, who in 2009 served as a member of USAID's conflict assessment team for Yemen. “They've been making that argument since 2007, but incidents like this are all sort of fodder for their argument.”

In the summer of 2010, after months of sustained US and Yemeni air strikes and raids, AQAP hit back. In June, a group of AQAP operatives dressed in military uniforms carried out a
bold raid
on the Aden division of Yemen's secret police, the Political Security Organization (PSO). During an early morning flag ceremony at the compound, the operatives launched rocket-propelled grenades and opened fire with automatic weapons as they stormed the gates. They gunned down at least ten security officers and three cleaning women. The purpose of the raid was to free suspected militants being held by the PSO, and it was successful. That raid was followed by a sustained assassination campaign during the summer aimed at high-level Yemeni military and intelligence officials. During the holy month of Ramadan, which began in August, AQAP
launched a dozen attacks
. By September as many as sixty officials had been killed, with a substantial number shot dead by assassins riding on motorcycles. The method of attack became so common that the government actually banned motorcycles in urban areas in Abyan. The
use of “motorbikes in terrorist operations
to assassinate intelligence officers and security personnel” has “massively mounted over the past nine months in the province,” said a Yemeni Interior Ministry official.

As Yemen's government found itself under siege and US covert actions expanded, Anwar Awlaki released a “Message to the American People.” In the speech, Awlaki said that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to bring down the airplane over Detroit was “
in retaliation to American cruise missiles
and cluster bombs that killed women and children,” and he declared, “You have your B-52's, your Apaches, your Abrams and your cruise missiles, and we have small arms and simple improvised explosive devices. But we have men, who are dedicated and sincere, with hearts of lions.” Awlaki also launched into a diatribe against the US and Saleh governments. If “Bush is remembered as being the President who got America stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's looking like Obama wants to be remembered as the President who got America stuck in Yemen,” Awlaki declared. He said:

Obama has already started his war on Yemen, by the aerial bombings of Abyan and Shabwah. By doing that he has waged a publicity campaign for the Mujahideen in Yemen, and within days accomplished for them the work of years.... The corrupt Yemeni government officials and some of the tribal chiefs who claim to be your allies are having a ball these days. The word being passed around among them is that this is the time to extort the gullible American. Your politicians, military and intelligence officers are being milked for millions. The Yemeni
government officials are giving you big promises and handing you big bills: welcome to the world of Yemeni politicians.

What was remarkable about Awlaki's statement on the US relationship with Saleh was how true it rang to many veteran Yemen analysts. During this time, Awlaki began to achieve almost mythical status in the US media and government narrative on terrorist threats. But the real question was how big a threat he
actually
posed. Although the dispute did not play out publicly, there was deep division in the intelligence community over how to approach Awlaki. There was abundant evidence that he had praised attacks against the United States after the fact and had been in touch with Hasan and Abdulmutallab. There was also evidence that he called for violent jihad against the United States and its allies. But there was no conclusive evidence presented, at least not publicly, that Awlaki had played an operational role in any attacks.

In October 2009, the CIA had reportedly concluded that “
the agency lacked specific evidence
that he threatened the lives of Americans—which is the threshold for any capture-or-kill operation” against an American citizen. President Obama now disagreed with that assessment. Awlaki would have to die.

IN FEBRUARY
2010, journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye once again managed to find Awlaki and conducted the first interview with the American citizen since the news of his threatened assassination at the hands of the US government was made public. “Why do you think
the Americans want to kill you
?” Shaye asked Awlaki. “Because I am a Muslim and I promote Islam,” Awlaki responded, adding that the allegations against him—in the media, not in a court of law—were based around the idea that he had “incited” Nidal Hasan and Abdulmutallab and that his taped teachings had been found in the possession of accused conspirators in more than a dozen alleged terror plots. “All this comes as part of the attempt to liquidate the voices that call for defending the rights of the Umma [the global Muslim community].” He added: “We call for the Islam that was sent by Allah to Prophet Muhammad, the Islam of jihad and Sharia ruling. Any voice that calls for this Islam, they either kill the person or the character; they kill the person by murdering or jailing them, or they kill the character by distorting their image in the media.”